Ethnomusicology without Erotics

TL;DR: In this article, the authors show how our teachers and friends, the musicians we spend so much time getting to know, negotiate a landscape shaped by those macroprocesses, and they tend to note this in a sentence that includes a list of many differences outlined with commas: she is a woman, an ethnic minority, from the working class, and from a certain religion.

Abstract: Ethnomusicology without Erotics Deborah Wong M ost ethnomusicologists write about a bleak world devoid of desire and empty of erotics. Naturally there are notable exceptions, but we often emphasize nationalism and globalization, manifesting a deeply internalized need to prove our discipline is doing important work (i.e., just as important as anthropology) despite the double feminization of our fi eld. 1 We show how our teachers and friends— the musicians we spend so much time getting to know— negotiate a landscape shaped by those macroprocesses. When we write about our friends’ and teachers’ gendered lives, we tend to note this in a sentence that includes a list of many differences outlined with commas: she is a woman, an ethnic minority, from the working class, and from a certain religion. But the commas can’t do the necessary critical work: we have trouble living up to the intersectional analyses we know we need. 2 As Sherrie Tucker 1 Notable exceptions include the work of Gregory Barz, Eileen Hayes, Joshua Pilzer, Gillian Rod- ger, and Henry Spiller. See Gregory F. Barz, Singing for Life: HIV / AIDS and Music in Uganda (New York: Routledge, 2006); Eileen M. Hayes, Songs in Black and Lavender: Race, Sexual Politics, and Women’s Music (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010); Joshua D. Pilzer, Hearts of Pine: Songs in the Lives of Three Korean Survivors of the Japanese “Comfort Women” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Gillian Rodger, Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima: Variety Theater in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010); Henry Spiller, Erotic Triangles: Sundanese Dance and Masculinity in West Java (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Anne McClintock reminds us that “All nationalisms are gendered, all are invented, and all are dangerous” (Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest [New York: Rout- ledge, 1995], 352). See Deborah Wong, “Sound, Silence, Music: Power,” Ethnomusicology 58, no. 2 (2014): 347– 53 for more about the feminization of ethnomusicology. 2 See Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review, 1991, 1241– 99.