Music, Sexuality, and Gender

4 credits · Graduate

This course introduces ethno/musicological approaches to the study of sexuality and gender. We will study scholarly works that consider how music informs and reflects cultural constructions of femininity, masculinity, and non-binary genders, and consider questions of sexuality within and apart from these frameworks. Taking wide-ranging examples that include popular music, folk and indigenous musics, and European art music, we will investigate how gendered and sexualized subjectivities are negotiated through musical practices such as composition, performance, audition, and consumption. Class readings will include ethnomusicological, musicological, anthropological, feminist, Marxist, and queer theory approaches.