Audio Intersectionality: Self-Identification Within the Processes of Interdisciplinary Explorations in Sound, Music, and Performance

Abstract

I have been searching the last decade for theoretical foundations and balance that demarcates my years of contemplating and demonstrating the variety of sound manipulations, innovations, and performance strategies that have engaged my cognitive and corporeal existence. Audio Intersectionality has become the framework, the contemporary theory that I am actively applying to interrogate, challenge, and resolve instances of hypermasculinity, racialization, gendering, sexualization, and other modes of classification through sound, music, and other variances of performance and audio maneuvering. I have come to realize that marginalized communities of color, especially but not singularly, queer communities of color, have been using sound, music, and performance as strategies of resistance and platforms of activism intrinsically. Over the last twenty-five years, particularly in African, African American (Black) Studies, Queer Black Studies, and Transgender of Color Studies, scholarly work has been duly dedicated to the power of performance as a vehicle to cultural, social, political, and educational self-determination for marginalized folk of color globally. The four sub-contexts of Audio Intersectionality that include Audio Assigning, Trans Audio, Audio Racialization, and Audio Confrontation encompass approaches of sound/action-based resistances capable of propelling creator, listener, and audience into alternative realms of existence in which to reevaluate constricting systems of oppression.