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THEORIZING GENDER, CULTURE, AND MUSIC
"Queer Vibrations"
THE THREE ARTICLES FEATURED IN THIS "Queer Vibrations" special section of Women & Music initially emerged as a result of an interdisciplinary graduate student conference on music and queer performance held at Cornell University in March 2007. ' Jointly funded by the Lesbian, Bisexual, and Gay Studies Program and the Department of Music, the conference brought together graduate stu- dents and faculty working within the fields of musicology, women's and gender studies, the- ater studies, and performance studies. "Queer Vibrations" proved to be an exciting event in terms of both the scope and the quality of the papers presented. These ranged from conversa- tions on gay and lesbian historiography and mu- sical reception (Samuel Dorf, Emily Wilbourne, and Tekla Babyak) to representations of queer male sexualities in popular culture and opera (Samuel Dwinell, Jeremy Mikush, and Kevin Schwandt) and from accounts of queer perfor- mance in terms of disidentification (Katie Brewer Ball, Tina Majkowski, and Zarko Cvejic) to keynote speeches on David Bowie and Andy Warhol (Judith Peraino) and the use of music as a form of torture at Guantánamo Bay (Suzanne Cusick). The "Queer Vibrations" conference also served to raise some fundamental questions about the relationship between femininity, transsexuality, and embodiment in the context of both women's music festivals and Third Wave feminism (Elizabeth K. Keenan), in Zarah Ersoff's reading of transsexual subjectivity in the music of Dana Baitz, and in Baitz's own account of queer musicology's fraught relation to transsexual embodiment. In short, I can only use this opportunity to thank all those who participated in the conference - both graduate students and faculty alike - for their commitment to LGBTQ musicology and for helping "Queer Vibrations" live up to its name.
The existence of "Queer Vibrations" is also strongly indebted to Judith Peraino, without whose presence in the Department of Music at Cornell a conference devoted to queer musicology would have been scarcely imaginable, let alone possible. Indeed, when Amy Villarejo first invited me to organize a graduate student conference on music and queer identities for the Lesbian, Bisexual, and Gay Studies Program at Cornell, I was forced to confront the somewhat disturbing (though perhaps not altogether surprising) reality that "Queer Vibrations" would be...