https://www.lgbtqmusicstudygroup.com/
Friday 3rd April 2020, University of York
Invitation to Participate
The LGBTQ+ Music Study Group hereby launches a new biennial initiative: “Queer Forum”. This day-long event aims to catalyse new ways of thinking, being and doing music scholarship in and beyond the academy. As José Esteban Muñoz writes, “[w]e may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality” (2009, 1). Inspired by queer and feminist theorists – especially bell hooks and Sara Ahmed – who are dissatisfied with the present, who wrestle with existing institutional structures, and who propose new modes of scholarship and education, we entice you to join us in radical academic experimentation in search for new horizons and potentialities.
The 2020 forum urges participants to recover queer pasts and imagine new queer futures. How do we create opportunity, time and space in the academy beyond the logics of capitalism to allow us to muse about music? What are the possibilities for forging strong/vulnerable subjectivities and caring solidarities within and beyond existing academic hierarchies? What freedoms can we gift ourselves to allow for experimentation in our musical writing, teaching and performing? How do we nurture and share intersectional wisdoms in ways that centre the health, well-being and vitality of ourselves and others?
The day will include no formal presentations; rather, it will be structured around a range of different creative, intellectual and social activities – workshops, reading groups, group work, interventions – that tempt us to try out new conceptualisations and embodiments of queer music scholarship. The day will begin at 9am and end at 5pm. Participants are welcome to join us for a dinner the evening before (Thursday 2nd April, 7pm).
We welcome musicians and scholars within music studies (including ethnomusicology, historical musicology, performance studies, popular music studies, theory and analysis, etc.) and beyond. The event is free to attend and we will offer refreshments during the day. Dinner and accommodation will be at participants’ own expenses. Information about accommodation will be sent out following event registration. Please register your participation on Eventbrite by 1st March 2020: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1st-queer-forum-of-the-lgbtq-music-study-group-tickets-92339677461
The event is organised by Marie Bennett, Rachel Cowgill, Thomas Hilder and Danielle Sofer. We are grateful to the University of York and the RMA for supporting this event. For any queries, please email: lgbtqmusicsg@gmail.com