Sounding Gender: Music, Identity, and Sexuality

Catalog description

This course concerns the wide range of relationships between music, gender, and sexuality across a host of musics and localities. Together we will explore how music informs and reflects cultural and social constructions of gender and sexuality. Drawing from examples that include popular music and Western art music, this course will investigate not only the methods by which music scholars have engaged with issues of gender and sexuality, but also how non-normative and sexualized subjectivities are negotiated, produced, and transgressed in and through musical practices. Students will come away with a firm sense for the questions that scholars have posed and the ways in which these questions have shaped and guided the relationships between gender, sexuality, and music. No prior knowledge of the subject material is required, nor will students need to have any knowledge of musical notation.