This course examines how music serves as a delightful site for performing, negotiating, and living queerness. Some questions we will ask include: How does queer musical performance inhabit the full gamut between conformity and subversion, irony and sincerity, or camp and authenticity? How do performers use or resist tropes of belonging, passing, and coming out to constitute queer performance? How do singers manipulate the sound of their voice, the gendered associations carried by that sound, and the assumptions about the body which produces it? Are queer musical acts a mode of performance or a way of being, and who decides? We will analyze a range of examples from the past and from contemporary popular culture: soft masculinities, cowboy and country personas, cross-dressing in music theater, lip-syncing drag queens and kings, high-femme divas, and performers of androgynous, cyborg, and post-human aesthetics. The parameters for what counts as queer performance are capacious, and students will have plenty of opportunities to contribute their own examples and case studies to the course.
Course Attributes: AS HUM; AS SC; EN H; FA HUM; AR HUM
