“Ethnomusicologists have barely addressed sexuality, sexual orientation, erotics, or sex. First, I consider how and why ethnomusicologists routinely address macro-phenomena like nationalism, globalization, ethnicity, and ritual, but not sexuality. Though colonialism had a global impact on attitudes about sexuality, ethnomusicologists have paid little attention to this despite our sustained interest in how colonialism fundamentally changed other social structures and—indeed—structures of feeling. Second, I address how certain ethnographic habits have led us to ignore what we learn about erotics. Our interlocutors may be more apt to musick about erotics (and less apt to talk about them), but the absence of talk becomes the ethnographic truth of the matter. Finally, I argue that ethnomusicological inattention to heteronormativity is a key absence. Our habits of aligning gender with women and sexuality with queerness has led to ethnomusicological silence on how heterosexism is musicked and indeed built into the majority of musics. My essay ends with a manifesto for ethnomusicological erotics.”

Deborah Wong is an ethnomusicologist who specializes in the musics of Thailand and Asian America. Her first book, Sounding the Center: History and Aesthetics in Thai Buddhist Ritual (Chicago University Press, 2001), addresses ritual performance about performance and its implications for the cultural politics of Thai court music and dance in late twentieth-century Bangkok. Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music (Routledge, 2004), focuses on music, race, and identity work in a series of case studies (Southeast Asian immigrant musics, Chinese American and Japanese American jazz in the Bay Area, and Asian American hip-hop).

Free, non-ticketed (a Valente Lecture)