Information

NEWS OF POTENTIAL INTEREST:

 

NEW BOOK

Queer Tracks: Subversive Strategies in Rock and Pop Music
Doris Leibetseder, Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt, Austria

‘From Grace Jones to Gaga, divas to dildos, Queer Tracks is an original and theoretically important contribution to the corpus of queer popular music studies. Through captivating accounts of rock and pop performers and texts, Doris Leibetseder’s provocative analysis of queer aesthetics, tactics and subversive strategies makes for an utterly compelling and enlightening read.’ – Jodie Taylor, Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith U, Australia and author of Playing it Queer: Popular Music, Identity and Queer World-making

‘Queer Tracks takes up its place in a growing body of scholarship genuinely concerned with queer strategies in popular music. In it, Doris Leibetseder navigates well the waters of queer theory, drawing on a wide range of theoretical concepts, from irony, parody, satire and camp, through mimesis, mimicry, and masquerade, to cyborgs and trans. Along the way, she guides the reader confidently through well-informed interpretation of a number of classic cases – Madonna, Peaches, Björk, Grace Jones, Annie Lennox – and pulls in strands from feminism and critical race theory. This book will prove a useful resource to any scholar or student in the field of popular music studies who is interested in issues of gender, sexuality, race, or identity at its broadest.’ – Freya Jarman, U of Liverpool, UK

Queer Tracks describes motifs in popular music that deviate from heterosexual orientation, the binary gender system and fixed identities.

This cutting-edge work deals with the key concepts of current gender politics and queer theory in rock and pop music, including irony, parody, camp, mask/masquerade, mimesis/mimicry, cyborg, transsexuality, and dildo. Queer Tracks is a revised translation of Queere Tracks.

Subversive Strategien in Rock- und Popmusik, originally published in German.

Contents: Introduction: historical prelude; Irony – the cutting edge; Parody – gender trouble; Camp – queer revolt in style; Mask/masquerade – transforming the gaze; Mimesis/mimicry – poetic aesthetic; Cyborg – transhuman; Trans* – border wars?; Dildo –gender blender; Fade out: looking forward; Bibliography; Index.

Sample pages are available to view online at: www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409437024

reframe.sussex.ac.uk/gqc/about-gqc/

We are pleased to announce the launch of our new website for the Global Queer Cinema project; a collaborative research project engaged in investigating queer film cultures from a global perspective and analysing world cinema from a queer point of view. The project is led by Rosalind Galt (University of Sussex) and Karl Schoonover (University of Warwick) and it is funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Network Grant. We are partnered with the British Film Institute and CineCity – the Brighton Film Festival.

We would like to invite you to take part in the project by reading, commenting on and discussing the project over at our website. The editorial collective for the website comprises Karl, Rosalind, and Catherine Grant (University of Sussex and Film Studies for Free). Our fellow contributor is Laura Ellen Joyce (University of Sussex), GQC Project Coordinator. The website collective also benefits from the support of the international editorial advisory board of its publisher REFRAME.Writings from members of the editorial board and the GQC network are launching the site, but we are eager to publish work from guest contributors. Please see our call for contributions here.

As for what you can already find archived here, our series Queer Frames asks an author to take a look at a single frame from a movie and analyse it. Long Takes offer a deeper look at films, directors and issues in queer global cinema. There are several short series which cover themes from the Queer Uncanny to Home Movies to Queer Cosmetics.

Posts will also focus on Queer Film Cultures, raising awareness of film festivals, events and activities. In addition, there is an online, and openly accessible,queer film studies resources section.

We will update the website regularly to alert our readers to the events and opportunities arising from the GQC project. So please use our website feed for updates, and also follow and talk to us on Twitter and Facebook.

Please share this information with colleagues and friends who may be interested, and take part in our community.

 “All Hail the Queenz: A Queer Feminist Recalibration of Hip Hop Scholarship” A Special Issue of Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory.

Issue Guest Editors: Shanté Paradigm Smalls (University of New Mexico) and Jessica N. Pabón (New York University)
Submission deadline: May 1, 2013
Women and Performance invites submissions for a special issue, “All Hail the Queenz: A Queer Feminist Recalibration of Hip Hop Scholarship.” The editors welcome scholarly articles and performative texts that foreground feminist and queer performance studies approaches to hip hop culture, consumption, and production.
Contemporary rap music, as a stand-in for hip hop culture and production, is virtually synonymous with misogyny and homophobia in the mainstream US and academic imaginary. We want to explore the range of understandings and theories that inform how women and queers experience hip hop culture and performance; this issue underscores the multiplicity of hip hop culture and rejects a myopic totalizing view of what “the culture” does and is. We seek to engage with the wide range of hip hop scholars and practitioners working at the intersections of various methodologies not always associated with scholarly considerations of hip hop (including psychoanalysis, feminist and queer theory, and performance theory), as well as methods typical to hip hop studies—sociology, Black studies, literature, history, musicology, and urban studies. An emerging class of hip hop scholars pressure the givens of race, gender, performance, sexuality, region, nationality, artistry, and iconography—as a culture that has been in a state of constant development for the past forty years, hip hop scholarship is more than due for a queer feminist remixing and reimagining.
As coeditors, we challenge the readers of Women & Performance to ask:
What would a specifically queer feminist performance studies approach to hip hop’s culture and production generate in terms of scholarship? How does a queer feminist experience and critique revise hip hop studies?
Why has performance studies had so little to say about hip hop, what interventions does performance studies yield? The issue’s focus on producing knowledge about hip hop culture that centralizes women, girls and queer people will include a range of elements, both popular and subcultural: DJ culture, dance, graffiti, human beat boxing, rap music, as well as fashion, media and print, organizing, and other forms of knowledge production. No matter the genre, hip hop is often conceived and misrepresented as a male-dominated culture which casts women and girls as an addendum to hip hop rather than as primary producers, critics, and consumers. Within the pages of this issue, contributors revisit the centrality of feminist and queer artists to the production of all elements of hip hop culture and of feminist and queer critique to hip hop scholarship. “All Hail the Queenz” intends to tease out the nuanced negotiations women, girls, and queer people develop as hip hop artists, critics, and consumers participating within this climate.
Through re-centering feminist and queer critiques and female and queer performance, “All Hail the Queenz” recalibrates hip hop’s center. By recalibrating the center, contributors to this issue refashion hip hop historiography and hip hop aesthetics beyond the art of rapping by the cisgendered male body. In a kind of textual reperformance, this issue takes its title from Queen Latifah’s lyrical demands for respect on her first womanist rap classic album, “All Hail the Queen,” and reminds readers once again that “stereotypes, they got to go!”

Potential Topics:
     * Alternate Hip Hop historiographies
     * Artist Scholars
     * DJing, technology, gender, sexuality
     * Feminist, queer, trans* aesthetics
     * Feminist, queer, trans* pedagogy
     * Graffiti and gender/sexuality
     * Hip Hop culture and dis/ability
     * Hip Hop diasporas
     * Hip Hop fashion
     * Hip Hop feminism
     * Hip Hop festivals
     * Hip Hop’s hybridity
     * Human Beatboxing
     * Media culture and social networking
     * Nation, Empire, and hip hop
     * Queer feminist hip hop critique
     * Queerness and/in/of hip hop
     * Trans* in/and hip hop
Article submissions should be 6-8,000 words in length and adhere to the current Chicago Manual of Style (CMS), author-date format. Performative texts should be 2-3,000 words and in any style the author chooses (same CMS style as above if using citations). Photo essays are welcome.
Questions and abstracts for review are welcome before the final deadline.
Complete essays and texts for consideration must be submitted by 11:59 PM EST, May 1, 2013.
Please send all work to both Shanté Paradigm Smalls and Jessica N. Pabón via email (MSWord attachment): shantesmalls@gmail.comand jnp250@nyu.edu.
Further submission guidelines may be found at:
www.womenandperformance.org/submission.html. Women and Performance is a peer reviewed journal published by Routledge, Taylor & Francis.