Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 25, Issue 4, Pages 411414

Different Love?: Introducing the Trans/Queer Issue

Tavia Nyongo

New York University

Francesca Royster

Depaul University The summer this issue went to press was a momentous one. In June 2013, the US Supreme Court decision on United States v. Windsor held the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act to be unconstitutional, opening the door to the federal recognition of same-sex marriage. That same summer, the single Same Love, released the prior year as part of a campaign for marriage equality in Washington State, became a ubiquitous presence on radio and social media, culminating in a live performance at the August MTV Video Music Awards by its writers Macklemore, Ryan Lewis (who also produced the song), and Mary Lambert, with a guest appearance by Jennifer Hudson. Accompanied by affecting images of a gay male couple, and featuring an indelible hook sung by one woman to another, Same Love sought to bring issues of political equality home to a generation raised on Glee and Ellen. In times like these, it would seem, queers should be whistling a happy tune. Advances in legal recognition and social visibility, however, affect people very differently, depending on their desire for, or indeed their access to, the normativity that such advances presuppose. However effective a sound bite, our love is not all the same, and neither are our lives. Despite legal recognitions, violence against LGBT people continued in 2013, workplace discrimination often went unpunished, and the state continued to repress trans and queer lives through many of its institutions, from prisons to schools, from the military to the immigration bureau. The same court that overturned DOMA delivered a horrific civil rights setback with the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. That, and the acquittal of the killer of Trayvon Martin by an almost all-white jury gave black and antiracist LGBT people few reasons to feel included in the myth of national progress. Ongoing war provided another grim backdrop. The summer of 2013 also saw the military trial and conviction of transgender soldier Chelsea Manning, the heroic whistleblower behind WikiLeaks, after a long period of
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2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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cruel solitary confinement. While imprisoned, Manning was voted a Grand Marshal of San Francisco Pride, but that symbolic honor was hurriedly revoked by SF Prides corporate board, who were afraid of antagonizing their promilitary sponsors. Despite this setback, Mannings supporters came out in droves, demonstrating the vitality of trans and queer politics even in homonationalist times. The very difficulty some found in conceptualizing Mannings activism against government crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of a trans and queer strugglerather than as a separate and unrelated issuespeaks to the narrowing and depoliticizing effects of single-issue politics and the rhetoric of sameness. It was in such a context that we completed editing this volume of essays dedicated to recent theorizations of gender and sexual nonconformity in popular music. As the Macklemore/Lewis/Lambert single suggests, our moment is an ambiguous one, one in which progressive-minded PSAs for tolerance exist alongside the unreconstructed sounds of militarism, homophobia, racism, and sexism. It is still a moment in which straight allies are safer objects of public approbation than out LGBT artists, particularly those whose music is not a bid for mainstream acceptability. Queer and trans music may no longer have the dubious privilege of existing entirely on the margins. Crossover acts bidding for the mainstream continue to appear, whether we personally like their music much or not. Queer and camp aesthetics are pervasively merchandised and ubiquitous, narrowing the range of oppositional consciousness they could once occupy. But in reading the contributions for this volume, we were struck by the ongoing relevance and power of difference in this era of putative sameness. Four particular arenas of difference stood out for us: (1) The first arena that struck us in reading the contributions to this issue was the way that the theoretical questions posed moved beyond the program of merely expanding a queer archive of performances, or even of multiplying ways of thinking about sexual dissidence in genre terms. These essays instead began to ask what queer sound can tell us about ontology, relationality, identification, and overidentification. We saw reflected here, too, the ways that discourses on affect and the politics of emotion have changed how we think about queerness in both the performative speech act and musical performance. So we are thinking about sound in relation to embodiment and subjectivity in ways that are profoundly political, from Robin Jamess work on Atari Teenage Riots critique of neoliberalism to Summer Kim Lees excavation of

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Blood Oranges insistence on reviving erased and devalued icons of black queer masculinity and femininity. (2) Among the contributors, Elias Krell and Lee are the most interested in issues of genderin music as a space for the production of gender identity, and in the status of gender identity as fluid and ultimately openended. While Krells essay is the most directly about transgender issues, both essays invite us to think across genders and sexualities as we listen to desire affecting performance. Krell gives us some ways that performing music as transgender becomes a space for dreaming a reconceptualized self. As editors, we had aspired to a more even representation of queer and trans essays than we were finally able to include. But the trans representation we do have whets our appetite for the important work in this area that is near on the horizon. (3) As scholars who gulped down greedily the old school Cultural Studies work of folks like Robie, Frith, and others, the essays in this issue reflect a necessary rethinking of the ways that we think about music fandom and the pleasures/desires expressed through the consumption of music. In part, this shift reflects a healthy and growing skepticism of the ruses of participation and inclusion. Consider Victor Szabos work in this issue on Xiu Xius performance of nonmastery, incivility, suicide, and shame, alongside Jamess discussion of Atari Teenage Riots soundings of death as a space of potential resistance. This is a very different terrain from where the discussions of subcultural belonging that took place in early cultural studies left us. What communities of listeners look like, what they listen for, what forms of belonging they seek to make or unmake, have become as indeterminate as performer identification. (4) Which leads us to our final arena of difference. The status of resistance in all these essays has also been quite fascinating to us. Even in a critique of progress narratives, the ghost of resistance and subversion flickers. Here, there may be a surprising connection to be made between the freedom drive of the queer theatrical jazz aesthetic in Bridgforths work, and especially the route through spirit and ways of reconceiving being, and the contrapuntal entry into the space of queer deatheven if on the surface these aesthetics sound quite different. Perhaps the most archivally revelatory essay in the volume, Lucas Hilderbrands Luring Disco Dollies to a Life of Vice also reframes questions of resistance and progress, even inverting our accustomed sense of a temporal progression from gay to queer with a historicist nod to Nietzsches eternal return.

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The essays in this volume lead us to conclude that queer and trans musics are not so much different from cisgender or heterosexual music, as they are better thought of as difference as such. Music is an activity of differentiation; its queerness resounds through the exercise of self-differing it invites us into, not through the identities it consolidates. No attempt to be comprehensive or authoritative about this difference on our part could possibly succeed. Instead, we offer these essays as select pathways into a much larger labyrinth of sound, desire, affect, and play. They do not so much provide a map out of the labyrinth as they serve as invitations to the reckless pleasures of staying lost.