Content area
Full text
Abstract
Inspired by the life and works of GrammyAward® winning artist, Lil Nas X, we explore ways a young Black queer musician has enacted emancipatory utopias to disrupt dominant cultural modes of being-offering unapologetic expressions and expansions of race, gender, and sexual identity. In this paper, we draw upon José Esteban Muñoz and Ytasha Womak to consider how utopian thinking through the lenses of queer futurity and Afrofuturism provides a way to dismantle the hegemonic and proleptic trappings of music education and contemplate how music learners and teachers might enact emancipatory utopias relevant to their own historically lived experiences.
Keywords: Queer futurity, Afrofuturism, Utopia, Lil Nas X, LGBTQ, Music Education
Music knowledge has been passed down between generations for millennia. Embedded in this transmission process are social, historical, and political codes of behavior and being. These often unquestioned social and cultural constructions and norms shape how learners see themselves, how they formulate their identities, and how they hold a sense of belonging within their communities and the world. Cultures, and the institutions of education that reflect and disseminate their values, are ripe with hegemonic expectations that often stifle and constrain the actualization of one's fullest humanity. Consider how spaces for musical engagement reinscribe racialized, classist, ableist, gendered, or heteronormative narratives and mores. Alternatively, imagine a music education devoid of the trappings of these hegemonic constructions and expectations, where one is free to create an emancipatory utopian world in one's own image, rather than one pre-ordained or constructed to reflect the values of past generations. What artistic and musical examples exist to reflect such resistance? How might music learning spaces be designed to facilitate such untethered agency and expression? And how might this process of emancipatory utopian thinking inspire change within music education?
In her book chapter, "Utopian Thinking, Compliance, and Visions of Wonderful Transformation," Susan Conkling advocates that music educators should embrace utopian thinking to reimagine music education beyond a static status quo.1 Yet, she warns that utopian thinking can devolve into "fanciful, unrealistic, and distracting thinking on the one hand or a dangerous, totalizing blueprint on the other."2 Accordingly, she draws upon Henry Giroux's call for an educated hope, encouraging readers to embrace uncertainty and to challenge a culture of compliance. Motivated by...