Singing out Together: Towards a Queer Ethnography of Music and Sexuality.

Miyake, Esperanza (2007) Singing out Together: Towards a Queer Ethnography of Music and Sexuality. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

This thesis seeks to understand the relationship between music and sexuality within the context of urban lesbian and gay music and music-making practices. Theoretically, I am mainly informed by queer musicology, popular music studies, cultural and subcultural studies, and the sociology of music. Building upon existing queer and feminist understandings of music and sexuality, I problematise both the conflation of sexuality and gender in music, and the conceptualisation of sexuality as part of an erotic exchange in music. How might we think about the relationship between music and sexuality beyond questions of gender and the erotic? I attempt to answer this question through an ethnography of the Manchester Lesbian and Gay Chorus, based in the city of Manchester. My practical research follows other ethnographers like Ruth Finnegan and Tia De Nora who chronicle the social process of music-making in everyday life. Through qualitative interviews and participant observations conducted with members of the MLGC, this project explores what part music plays in affirming, re-affirming or otherwise challenging the position of lesbians and gay men within a contemporary British city like Manchester. What kind of social, cultural, and political conditions are necessary in bringing music and sexuality together? During the course of my investigations, I also investigate what terms like queer, queerness, and queering mean in relation to the music-sexuality relationship. What does queer mean within the context of lesbian and gay music and music-making practices? What is queerness in music, and how might we read it? What does queering music and queering through music entail? This project seeks to answer such questions by taking an interdisciplinary approach to the ethnographic material and situating itself within the existing literature on music and sexuality.