In May, Ireland could become the first country in the world to pass marriage equality by referendum. The establishment of marriage equality in Ireland has the potential to bring about the development of new subjectivities, for gender and sexuality are key parts of the process by which we become thinking, acting subjects. They are culturally contingent. Our current ways of understanding and doing gender and sexuality originate in the nineteenth-century invention of heterosexuality and homosexuality that compelled all members of our society, regardless of orientation, to negotiate heteronormativity and might yet become a thing of the past.
Legislative change is essential to create an equal society. So are progressive conceptual models, and critical cultural readings. Critical work on sexuality and gender is vital to establish that there is no ‘normal’ sexuality, no ‘normal’ way to be a woman or a man—to resist the development of new normative ways of being. Roundtable participants will use women’s history, feminist intersectionality, critical race theory, and queer theory combined with close readings of past and present European cultures, and critical reconsiderations of ethnomusicological and musicological methodologies, to make diverse sexualities and gender visible, speakable and culturally intelligible.
Roundtable Presentations
Prof. Nina Treadwell (University of California, Santa Cruz), ‘Performing Queerness in Early Modern Italy [Why Do We Care?]’
Prof. Tes Slominski (Beloit College), ‘Queering Fieldwork: A Fable of Belonging’
Dr Melanie Marshall (University College Cork), ‘The Ideology of Purity in Early Music Revival’
Prof. Rachel Cowgill (University of Huddersfield), ‘Reading against the Grain: Queering the Archive in Musicologies of the First World War’
Organizer: Dr Melanie L. Marshall
Chair: Dr Melanie L. Marshall