LGBTQIA+ and Queer Music Literature: Ebooks
This page serves as a beginning guide to queer music literature available to UB students and faculty through online resource sharing.
To access the resource click on the title. The hyperlink will take you to the ebook's host site.
Many resources are on sites restricted to UB students and faculty. You will need to be signed into your UB account in order to access these materials. Please see UBIT for assistance
To see the ebook's description click the information icon following the title and author's name. Additional information can be found on the ebook's host site.
Queer Musicology and History
Listening to the Sirens by
In this fresh and innovative study, Judith A. Peraino investigates how music has been used throughout history to call into question norms of gender and sexuality. Beginning with a close examination of the mythology surrounding the sirens-whose music seduced Ulysses into a state of mind in which he would gladly sacrifice everything for the illicit pleasures promised in their song-Peraino goes on to consider the musical creatures, musical gods and demigods, musical humans, and music-addled listeners who have been associated with behavior that breaches social conventions. She deftly employs a sophisticated reading of Foucault as an organizational principle as well as a philosophical focus to survey seductive and transgressive queerness in music from the Greeks through the Middle Ages and to the contemporary period. Listening to the Sirens analyzes the musical ways in which queer individuals express and discipline their desire, represent themselves, build communities, and subvert heterosexual expectations. It covers a wide range of music including medieval songs, works by Handel, Tchaikovsky and Britten, women's music and disco, performers such as Judy Garland, Melissa Etheridge, Madonna, and Marilyn Manson, and the movies The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
ISBN: 9780520215870Publication Date: 2005-10-30
Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology by
Drawing on ethnographic research and often deeply personal experiences with musical cultures, Queering the Field: Sounding out Ethnomusicology unpacks a history of sentiment that veils the treatment of queer music and identity within the field of ethnomusicology. The thematic structure of the volume reflects a deliberate cartography of queer spaces in the discipline-spaces that are strongly present due to their absence, are marked by direct sonic parameters, or are called into question by virtue of their otherness. As the first large-scale study of ethnomusicology's queer silences and queer identity politics, Queering the Field directly addresses the normativities currently at play in musical ethnography (fieldwork, analysis, performance, transcription) as well as in the practice of musical ethnographers (identification, participation, disclosure, observation, authority). While rooted in strong narrative convictions, the authors frequently adopt radicalized voices with the goal of queering a hierarchical sexual binary. The essays in the volume present rhetorical and syntactical scenarios that challenge us to read in prescient singular ways for future queer writing and queer thought in ethnomusicology.
ISBN: 9780190458034Publication Date: 2019-10-21
Roll over, Tchaikovsky!: Russian Popular Music and Post-Soviet Homosexuality by
Centered on the musical experiences of homosexual men in St. Petersburg and Moscow, this ground-breaking study examines how post-Soviet popular music both informs and plays off of a corporeal understanding of Russian male homosexuality. Drawing upon ethnography, musical analysis, and phenomenological theory, Stephen Amico offers an expert technical analysis of Russian rock, pop, and estrada music, dovetailing into an illuminating discussion of homosexual men's physical and bodily perceptions of music. He also outlines how popular music performers use song lyrics, drag, physical movements, images of women, sexualized male bodies, and other tools and tropes to implicitly or explicitly express sexual orientation through performance. Finally, Amico uncovers how such performances help homosexual Russian men to create their own social spaces and selves, in meaningful relation to others with whom they share a "nontraditional orientation."
ISBN: 9780252038273Publication Date: 2014-05-29
Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology by
When the first edition of Queering the Pitch was published in early 1994, it was immediately hailed as a landmark and defining work in the new field of Gay Musicology. In light of the explosion of Gay Musicology since 1994, a new edition of Queering the Pitch is timely and needed. In this new work, the editors are including a landmark essay by Philip Brett on Gay Musicology, its history and scope. The essay itself has become a cause celebre, and this will be its first full appearance in print. Along with this new historical essay, the editors are contributing a new introduction that outlines the changes that have occurred over the last decade as Gay Musicology has grown.
ISBN: 9780415978835Publication Date: 2006-08-31
Rocking the Closet: How Little Richard, Johnnie Ray, Liberace, and Johnny Mathis Queered Pop Music by
The all-embracing, "whaddya got?" nature of rebellion in Fifties America included pop music's unlikely challenge to entrenched notions of masculinity. Within that upheaval, four prominent artists dared to behave in ways that let the public assume--but not see--their queerness. That these artists cultivated ambiguous sexual personas often reflected an understandable fear, but also a struggle to fulfill personal and professional expectations. Vincent L. Stephens confronts notions of the closet--both coming out and staying in--by analyzing the careers of Liberace, Johnny Mathis, Johnnie Ray, and Little Richard. Appealing to audiences hungry for novelty and exoticism, the four pop icons used performance and queering techniques that ran the gamut. Liberace's flamboyance shared a spectrum with Mathis's intimate sensitivity while Ray's overwrought displays as "Mr. Emotion" seemed worlds apart from Little Richard's raise-the-roof joyousness. As Stephens shows, the quartet not only thrived in an era of gray flannel manhood, they pioneered the ways generations of later musicians would consciously adopt sexual mystery as an appealing and proven route to success.
ISBN: 9780252042805Publication Date: 2019-10-16
Musical Theater and Queerness
Queer Approaches in Musical Theatre by
Queer Approaches in Musical Theatre introduces readers to a facet of musicals often assumed but misunderstood: how queer approaches in musical theatre extend deeper than fabulosity. Queerness in musicals challenges their typical heteronormativity but also sometimes simultaneously reinforces it. Featuring four case studies centered around musicals such as The Book of Mormon, Cabaret, Fun Home, La Cage aux Folles and Rent, this concise study examines the stakes of representation in the theatrical genre most often presumed to be openly queer. Providing readers with an understanding of the historically-shifting terminology of queerness, this foundational book offers a brief overview of how queer studies informs the analysis of musicals themselves, and introduces histories of queerness in musicals as well as methods of how to examine the historical context, text, staging and reception of these works.
ISBN: 9781350247628Publication Date: 2023-07-27
Love Is Love Is Love: Broadway Musicals and LGBTQ Politics, 2010-2020 by
The politics of Broadway musicals matter a great deal more to U.S. American culture than they appear to mean, and they are especially important to mainstream politics surrounding sex, gender, and sexuality. Love Is Love Is Love looks to the Broadway musicals of the past decade for help understanding the current state of LGBTQ politics in the United States. Through analyses of Promises, Promises, Newsies, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, The Color Purple, and Frozen, this book attempts to move past the question of representational politics and asks us instead to think in more complex ways about LGBTQ identity, what LGBTQ politics are, and the politics of Broadway musicals themselves. Producing new, complex readings of all five of these musicals, author Aaron C. Thomas places each of them within the context of the LGBTQ politics of their day. Some of the issues the book treats are controversies of casting, the closetedness and openness of musical theatre, LGBTQ identities, adaptation from movies into musicals, and the special power of the musical form by examining how these shows differ from the books and movies on which they're based. Love Is Love Is Love places contemporary LGBTQ political tensions and conversations in a new light, making this an essential companion for students and scholars of contemporary theatre, musical theatre, cultural studies, Queer studies, and gender studies.
ISBN: 9781032329499Publication Date: 2023-03-24
Doing the Time Warp by
Doing the Time Warp explores how song and dance - sites of aesthetic difference in the musical - can 'warp' time and enable marginalized and semi-marginalized fans to imagine different ways of being in the world. While the musical is a bastion of mainstream theatrical culture, it also supports a fan culture of outsiders who dream themselves into being in the strange, liminal timespaces of its musical numbers. Through analysing musicals of stage and screen - ranging from Rent to Ragtime, Glee to Taylor Mac's A 24-Decade History of Popular Music - Sarah Taylor Ellis investigates how alienated subjects find moments of coherence and connection in musical theatre's imaginaries of song and dance. Exploring an array of archival work and live performance, such as Larry Gelbart's papers in the UCLA Performing Arts Collections and the shadowcast performances of Los Angeles's Sins o' the Flesh, Doing the Time Warp probes the politics of musicals and consider show the genre's 'strange temporalities' can point towards new futurities for identities and communities in difference.
ISBN: 9781350151703Publication Date: 2022-02-24
Gays on Broadway by
A fascinating look at the gay and lesbian influence on the American stage by an internationally-recognized authority on the topic From the genteel female impersonators of the 1910s to the raucous drag queens of La Cage Aux Folles, from the men of The Normal Heart to the women of Fun Home, and from Eva Le Gallienne and Tallulah Bankhead to Tennessee Williams and Nathan Lane, Gays On Broadway deftly chronicles the plays and people that brought gay culture to Broadway. Writing with his customary verve and wit, author Ethan Mordden follows the steady liberation of gay themes on the American stage. The story begins in the early twentieth century, when gay characters were virtually banned from productions. The 1920s saw a flurry of plays closed on moral grounds as well as the Wales Padlock Act, which forbade representation of "sex degeneracy". While authorities made consistent attempts to shutter the movement, the public remained curious, and after a few decades of war making, a truce broke out when The Boys In the Band became a national smash hit. From this point on, gay theatre proved simply too popular to abolish. With this change, theatre was graced with a host of unforgettable characters - from thrill killers to historical figures to drag performers, as well as professional gays (such as the defiantly effeminate window dresser in Kiss of the Spider Woman), closeted gays, and those run-of-the-mill citizens who don't reside entirely within the colorful nonconformist identity (such as the two male lovers in the dinner-theatre comedy Norman, Is That You?). Spoken plays and musicals, playwrights, directors, and actors all played their part in popularizing the gay movement through art. Gays on Broadway is an essential chronological review of the long journey to bring the culture of gay men and women onto the American stage.
ISBN: 0190063106Publication Date: 2023-06-01
And This Is My Friend Sandy by
This book situates the production of The Boy Friend and the Players' Theatre in the context of a post-war London and reads The Boy Friend, and Wilson's later work, as exercises in contemporary camp. It argues for Wilson as a significant and transitional figure both for musical theatre and for modes of homosexuality in the context of the pre-Wolfenden 1950s. Sandy Wilson's The Boy Friend is one of the most successful British musicals ever written. First produced at the Players' Theatre Club in London in 1953 it transferred to the West End and Broadway, making a star out of Julie Andrews and gave Twiggy a leading role in Ken Russell's 1971 film adaptation. Despite this success, little is known about Wilson, a gay writer working in Britain in the 1950s at a time when homosexuality was illegal. Drawing on original research assembled from the Wilson archives at the Harry Ransom Center, this is the first critical study of Wilson as a key figure of 1950s British theatre. Beginning with the often overlooked context of the Players' Theatre Club through to Wilson's relationship to industry figures such as Binkie Beaumont, Noël Coward and Ivor Novello, this study explores the work in the broader history of Soho gay culture. As well as a critical perspective on The Boy Friend, later works such as Divorce Me, Darling!, The Buccaneer and Valmouth are examined as well as uncompleted musical versions of Pygmalion and Goodbye to Berlin to give a comprehensive and original perspective on one of British theatre's most celebrated yet overlooked talents.
ISBN: 9781350174214Publication Date: 2021-03-25
Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies by
"James F. Wilson uncovers fascinating new material on the Harlem Renaissance, shedding light on the oft-forgotten gay and lesbian contributions to the era's creativity and Civil Rights. Extremely well researched, compellingly written, and highly informative." ---David Krasner, author of A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910-1927 Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies shines the spotlight on historically neglected plays and performances that challenged early twentieth-century notions of the stratification of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. On Broadway stages, in Harlem nightclubs and dance halls, and within private homes sponsoring rent parties, African American performers of the 1920s and early 1930s teased the limits of white middle-class morality. Blues-singing lesbians, popularly known as "bulldaggers," performed bawdy songs; cross-dressing men vied for the top prizes in lavish drag balls; and black and white women flaunted their sexuality in scandalous melodramas and musical revues. Race leaders, preachers, and theater critics spoke out against these performances that threatened to undermine social and political progress, but to no avail: mainstream audiences could not get enough of the riotous entertainment. Many of the plays and performances explored here, central to the cultural debates of their time, had been previously overlooked by theater historians. Among the performances discussed are David Belasco's controversial production of Edward Sheldon and Charles MacArthur's Lulu Belle (1926), with its raucous, libidinous view of Harlem. The title character, as performed by a white woman in blackface, became a symbol of defiance for the gay subculture and was simultaneously held up as a symbol of supposedly immoral black women. African Americans Florence Mills and Ethel Waters, two of the most famous performers of the 1920s, countered the Lulu Belle stereotype in written statements and through parody, thereby reflecting the powerful effect this fictional character had on the popular imagination. Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies is based on historical archival research including readings of eyewitness accounts, newspaper reports, songs, and playscripts. Employing a cultural studies framework that incorporates queer and critical race theory, it argues against the widely held belief that the stereotypical forms of black, lesbian, and gay show business of the 1920s prohibited the emergence of distinctive new voices. Specialists in American studies, performance studies, African American studies, and gay and lesbian studies will find the book appealing, as will general readers interested in the vivid personalities and performances of the singers and actors introduced in the book. James F. Wilson is Professor of English and Theatre at LaGuardia Community College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
ISBN: 9780472034895Publication Date: 2011-07-30
Music Theory and Education
Marginalized Voices in Music Education by
Marginalized Voices in Music Education explores the American culture of music teachers by looking at marginalization and privilege in music education as a means to critique prevailing assumptions and paradigms. In fifteen contributed essays, authors set out to expand notions of who we believe we are as music educators -- and who we want to become. This book is a collection of perspectives by some of the leading and emerging thinkers in the profession, and identifies cases of individuals or groups who had experienced marginalization. It shares the diverse stories in a struggle for inclusion, with the goal to begin or expand conversation in undergraduate and graduate courses in music teacher education. Through the telling of these stores, authors hope to recast music education as fertile ground for transformation, experimentation and renewal.
ISBN: 9780415788328Publication Date: 2017-10-26
Imagining Queer Methods by
Imagining Queer Methods' showcases the methodological renaissance unfolding in queer scholarship. This volume brings together emerging and esteemed researchers from all corners of the academy who are defining new directions for the field. From critical race studies, history, journalism, lesbian feminist studies, literature, media studies, and performance studies to anthropology, education, psychology, sociology, and urban planning, this impressive interdisciplinary collection covers topics such as humanistic approaches to reading, theorizing, and interpreting, as well as scientific appeals to measurement, modeling, sampling, and statistics. By bringing together these diverse voices into an unprecedented single volume, Amin Ghaziani and Matt Brim inspire us with innovative ways of thinking about methods and methodologies in queer studies.
ISBN: 1479808555Publication Date: 2019
The Politics of Diversty in Music Education by
This open access book examines the political structures and processes that frame and produce understandings of diversity in and through music education. Recent surges in nationalist, fundamentalist, protectionist and separatist tendencies highlight the imperative for music education to extend beyond nominal policy agendas or wholly celebratory diversity discourses. Bringing together high-level theorisation of the ways in which music education upholds or unsettles understandings of society and empirical analyses of the complex situations that arise when negotiating diversity in practice, the chapters in this volume explore the politics of inquiry in research; examine music teachers’ navigations of the shifting political landscapes of society and state; extend conceptualisations of diversity in music education beyond familiar boundaries; and critically consider the implications of diversity for music education leadership. Diversity is thus not approached as a label applied to certain individuals or musical repertoires, but as socially organized difference, produced and manifest in various ways as part of everyday relations and interactions. This compelling collection serves as an invitation to ongoing reflexive inquiry; to deliberate the politics of diversity in a fast-changing and pluralist world; and together work towards more informed and ethically sound understandings of how diversity in music education policy, practice, and research is framed and conditioned both locally and globally.
ISBN: 9783030656171Publication Date: 2021
Queer Ear: Remaking Music Theory by
Through provisional, idiosyncratic, and non-normative listening practices, Queer Ear: Remaking Music Theory counters music theory's continuing tendencies towards rationality, unity, unilinearity, teleology, and logical certainty. In this volume, editor Gavin S.K. Lee brings together a diverse group of music theorists who issue queer challenges to both music theory and musicology and show that queerness is integral to music-theoretical practice. These investigations of the "queer ear" and queer soundings, while drawing upon a broad range of approaches, are united by the repurposing of "hard" music-theoretical apparatuses, as well as "soft" apparatuses like narratology and cultural theory, for queer ends. Such repurposings contribute to the search for general principles--or a theory--of queering that counters mainstream music theory's proclivities, instead encouraging everyone to experiment with queer ways of listening. Through the lenses of queer temporality, queer narratology, and queer music analysis, the essays examine a wide variety of artists and composers, including Sun Ra, Cowell, Czernowin, Henze, Schubert, and Schumann; theories ranging from Schenker to queer shame, disability studies, and posthumanism; and authors such as Edward Cone and Edward Prime-Stevenson. Together, they rethink the field's major tenets, examine hidden histories, and view listening practices from the perspective of non-normative subjectivities. Ultimately, Queer Ear works to queer the field of music theory while paying heed to the ways in which music theory intersects with diverse, embodied LGBTQ lives.
ISBN: 9780197536780Publication Date: 2023-11-01
Queer Identity in Popular Music
Playing It Queer: Popular Music, Identity and Queer World-making
Popular music has always been a dynamic mediator of gender and sexuality, and a productive site of rebellion, oddity and queerness. The transformative capacity of music-making, performance and consumption helps us to make sense of identity and allows us to glimpse otherworldliness, arousing the political imagination. With an activist voice that is impassioned yet adherent to scholarly rigour, Playing it Queerprovides an original and compelling ethnographic account of the relationship between popular music, queer self-fashioning and (sub)cultural world-making. This book begins with a comprehensive survey and critical evaluation of relevant literatures on queer identity and political debates as well as popular music, identity and (sub)cultural style. Contextualised within a detailed history of queer sensibilities and creative practices, including camp, drag, genderfuck, queercore, feminist music and club cultures, the author's rich empirical studies of local performers and translocal scenes intimately capture the meaning and value of popular musics and (sub)cultural style in everyday queer lives.
Queer Voices in Hip Hop: Cultures, Communities, and Contemporary Performance
Notions of hip hop authenticity, as expressed both within hip hop communities and in the larger American culture, rely on the construction of the rapper as a Black, masculine, heterosexual, cisgender man who enacts a narrative of struggle and success. In Queer Voices in Hip Hop, Lauron J. Kehrer turns our attention to openly queer and trans rappers and positions them within a longer Black queer musical lineage. Combining musical, textual, and visual analysis with reception history, this book reclaims queer involvement in hip hop by tracing the genre's beginnings within Black and Latinx queer music-making practices and spaces, demonstrating that queer and trans rappers draw on Ballroom and other cultural expressions particular to queer and trans communities of color in their work in order to articulate their subject positions. By centering the performances of openly queer and trans artists of color, Queer Voices in Hip Hop reclaims their work as essential to the development and persistence of hip hop in the United States as it tells the story of hip hop's queer roots.
The Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness
Music and queerness interact in many different ways. The Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness brings together many topics and scholarly disciplines, reflecting the diversity of current research and methodology. Each of the book's six sections exemplifies a particular rhetoric of queer music studies. The section "Kinds of Music" explores queer interactions with specific musics such as EDM, hip hop, and country. "Versions" explores queer meanings that emerge in the creation of a version of a pre-existing text, for instance in musical settings of Biblical texts or practices of karaoke. "Voices and Sounds" turns in various ways to the materiality of music and sound. "Lives" focuses on interactions of people's lives with music and queerness. "Histories" addresses moments in the past, beginning with times when present conceptualizations of sexuality had not yet developed and moving to cases studies of more recent history, including the creation of pop songs in response to HIV/AIDS and the Eurovision song contest. The final section, "Cross-cultural Queerness," asks how to understand gender and sexuality in locations where recent Euro-American concepts may not be appropriate.
Queer Country
A Variety Best Music Book of 2022 A No Depression Most Memorable Music Book of 2022 A Library Journal Best Arts and Humanities Book of 2022 A Pitchfork Best Music Book of 2022 A Boot Best Music Book of 2022 A Ticketmaster Best Music Book of 2022 A Happy Magazine Best Music Book of 2022 Woody Guthrie First Book Award winner Awarded a Certificate of Merit in the 2023 ARSC Awards for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research in the category Best Historical Research in Country, Folk, Roots, or World Music. Though frequently ignored by the music mainstream, queer and transgender country and Americana artists have made essential contributions as musicians, performers, songwriters, and producers. Queer Country blends ethnographic research with analysis and history to provide the first in-depth study of these artists and their work. Shana Goldin-Perschbacher delves into the careers of well-known lesbian artists like k.d. lang and Amy Ray and examines the unlikely success of singer-songwriter Patrick Haggerty, who found fame forty years after releasing the first out gay country album. She also focuses on later figures like nonbinary transgender musician Rae Spoon and renowned drag queen country artist Trixie Mattel; and on recent breakthrough artists like Orville Peck, Amythyst Kiah, and chart-topping Grammy-winning phenomenon Lil Nas X. Many of these musicians place gender and sexuality front and center even as it complicates their careers. But their ongoing efforts have widened the circle of country/Americana by cultivating new audiences eager to connect with the artists' expansive music and personal identities. Detailed and one-of-a-kind, Queer Country reinterprets country and Americana music through the lives and work of artists forced to the margins of the genre's history.
The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music and Gender
Why is gender inseparable from pop songs? What can gender representations in musical performances mean? Why are there strong links between gender, sexuality and popular music? The sound of the voice, the mix, the arrangement, the lyrics and images, all link our impressions of gender to music. Numerous scholars writing about gender in popular music to date are concerned with the music industry's impact on fans, and how tastes and preferences become associated with gender. This is the first collection of its kind to develop and present new theories and methods in the analysis of popular music and gender. The contributors are drawn from a range of disciplines including musicology, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, philosophy, and media studies, providing new reference points for studies in this interdisciplinary field. Stan Hawkins's introduction sets out to situate a variety of debates that prompts ways of thinking and working, where the focus falls primarily on gender roles. Amongst the innovative approaches taken up in this collection are: queer performativity, gender theory, gay and lesbian agency, the female pop celebrity, masculinities, transculturalism, queering, transgenderism and androgyny. This Research Companion is required reading for scholars and teachers of popular music, whatever their disciplinary background.
Queer Arrangements: Billy Strayhorn and Midcentury Jazz Collaboration
Queer Arrangements is a new study of Billy Strayhorn that examines his music and career at the intersection of jazz and Black queer history The legacy of Black queer composer, arranger, and pianist Billy Strayhorn (1915?1967) hovers at the edge of canonical jazz narratives. Queer Arrangements explores the ways in which Strayhorn's identity as an openly gay Black jazz musician shaped his career, including the creative roles he could assume and the dynamics between himself and his collaborators, most famously Duke Ellington, but also iconic singers such as Lena Horne and Ella Fitzgerald. This new portrait of Strayhorn combines critical, historically-situated close readings of selected recordings, scores, and performances with biography and cultural theory to pursue alternative interpretive jazz possibilities, Black queer historical routes, and sounds. By looking at jazz history through the instrument(s) of Strayhorn's queer arrangements, this book sheds new light on his music and on jazz collaboration at midcentury.
Seduced and Abandoned: Essays on Gay Men and Popular Music
An examination of the different ways that gay men use pop music, as producers and consumers and how, in turn, pop music uses gay men. From Erasure 'being boring' to 'little town flirt' Suede, the essays and interviews look at how pop is a platform to explore, articulate, conform to or contest notions of sexuality and gender. Seduced and Abandoned examines themes including ambisexuality, masculinity, new lads, camp and much more, creating a collection that is both challenging and contentious. A defence of cultural differences and an attack on cultural elitism, this book is as passionate and provocative as pop itself.