Queer Hearing

The 2018 publication in Women & Music of a group of articles that emerged from the 2016 symposium "Race-ing Queer Music Scholarship" heralded some new possibilities for a queer/trans of color music studies. Within this special issue, Stephan Pennington and Elías Krell in particular laid the groundwork for what could be a trans music studies that places racial formations on equal footing with gender subjectivity. In this paper, I consider the possibilities of such a trans music studies that is also hemispheric in scope, centering transnational flows and diaspora in its critical approach. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, I examine the ways that transgender transformistas (gender performers) in Cuba describe their racial and sexual subjectivities in relation to their creative practice. Through their performances and their self-narration, these cultural workers suggest a complex and dynamic relationship between performance and subjectivity, one that complicates the often neatly drawn lines between gender performers and transgender people in both Cuban studies and scholarship on drag performance. Following these transformistas' lead, then, I attend to the transnational discourses of race and sex that link the history of gender performance to contemporary understandings of transgender subjectivity. In particular, I consider certain transformistas' engagement with the term travesti, a category of femme transgender subjectivity that is deployed throughout Latin America, to explore some meaningful relationships between performance, gender subjectivity, and racial formations throughout the hemisphere. Through this work, I wonder what scholarship on drag performance would look like if it centered transgender subjectivities, and I point to discussions in transgender studies that have emerged from analyses of performance and performers. Finally, I consider what future directions this encourages for music studies and suggest that further dialogue between transgender studies and music might invigorate ongoing discussions about historicity, transnationalism, and performance in both fields.

The highlight of the camp calendar comes each May, with the glorious glitter of the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC). In 2014, the ESC was won by Conchita Wurst--the bearded drag persona of Austrian singer Thomas Neuwirth--whose song 'Rise Like a Phoenix' is widely regarded to be the greatest Bond song that never was. The win firmly established Conchita as part of the queer canon of the ESC's historical highlights, a pantheon that includes space-queen Verka Serduckha (Ukraine, 2007) and trans woman Dana International (winning for Israel, 1998) among many others. 
In this paper, I will explore the intertextual web of vocal queerness triggered by 'Rise Like a Phoenix.' Taken by critics as a signal of deviant masculinity, Conchita's ESC-winning performance leads us directly to Shirley Bassey and the classic Bond canon. From there, we are catapulted into a long history of vocally excessive femininity, champions of which include not only Bassey--an African/English mixed-race Welshwoman--but also Barbra Streisand, Liza Minnelli, Sophie Tucker, and a rich tapestry woven of complexly racialised strands. The more recent Bond song repertoire, though, also features songs by Adele (who has been accused of 'blackvoicing' [Edgar 2014], of vocally appropriating the likes of Aretha Franklin, who in turn has covered Adele's 'Rolling in the Deep') and Sam Smith (who "had to grab [his] balls" in order to reach the highest notes of 'Writing's on the Wall,' and who has recently come out as non-binary). Meanwhile, Conchita's second studio album, From Vienna with Love (2018) is explicitly inspired by "mature ladies" such as Bassey, Cher, and Tina Turner; it includes covers of songs by Bassey and Streisand, unsurprisingly, but also of Smiths 'Writing's on the Wall.' 
Drawing on Elizabeth Freeman's notion of temporal drag (2011), I propose that Conchita opens up a vocal drag that ricochets temporally and racially through an intricate network of intertextual references, and that queer vocality needs to be read through always-already intersectional contexts of gender, race, and age.

As evident in Lil Nas X's public coming out in the summer of 2019, openly queer artists are garnering increasing acceptance within mainstream hip-hop. Discourses surrounding gender and sexuality in both the popular press and music scholarship, however, have largely ignored the role of openly queer Black women, especially those with masculine gender presentations. In recent years, female artists such as Young M.A and Syd have spoken openly about their experiences being queer rappers while simultaneously achieving commercial success, a rare feat in the genre. And yet, writing on queer hip-hop artists has continued to focus on men. In this paper, I examine lesbian rapper Young M.A's recent studio album, Herstory in the Making (2019) to demonstrate how she navigates hip-hop as a Black butch. Unlike other women rappers who balance a feminine gender presentation with a hardened, "masculine" lyrical approach (such as Nicki Minaj), or artists who are often read as queer but are not out (Queen Latifah, Missy Elliott), Young M.A. is explicit about her love for women, but often positions herself in performance as just one of the guys - a rapper who shares the aesthetics of her cisgender heterosexual male counterparts, but who just happens to be a woman. Cheryl L. Keyes positions black female rappers in a lineage with black women blues singers of the early twentieth century who rearticulate and redefine black female identity and use music as a site from which to "contest, protest, and affirm working-class ideologies of black womanhood" (2004, p. 187). I argue that rappers such as Young M.A also fit into this lineage as Black queer women - they exist on a continuum of Black queer music-making practices, but specifically articulate the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality for Black butches.