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8/12/2019 Different Love Wiley

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

Different Love?: Introducing the Trans/Queer Issue

Tavia NyongoNew York University

Francesca RoysterDepaul 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 1996Defense 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 bringissues of political equality home to a generation raised on Glee andEllen.

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 represstrans 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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412 Tavia Nyongo and Francesca Royster

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 antagonizingtheir 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 nonconformityin 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 programof 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 TeenageRiots critique of neoliberalism to Summer Kim Lees excavation of


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Different Love? 413

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 interestedin 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 forthe 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 subversionflickers. 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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414 Tavia Nyongo and Francesca Royster

The essays in this volume lead us to conclude that queer and trans

musics are not so much different fromcisgender or heterosexual music, as

they are better thought of as difference as such. Music is an activity ofdifferentiation; 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.

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