Thomas R. Hilder

<aside> 🕐

Approx. 10 hrs of learning materials, including:

Introduction

“[A]utoethnography is more than a method,” write scholars Stacy Holman Jones, Tony Adams, and Carolyn Ellis, adding it “is a way of living and of writing life honestly, complexly, and passionately” (2013, 41). In their 2013 book “Handbook of Autoethnography,” they explain how autoethnography is not just about the personal but also includes: “(1) purposefully commenting on/critique of culture and cultural practices, (2) making contributions to existing research, (3) embracing vulnerability with purpose, and (4) creating a reciprocal relationship with audiences in order to compel a response” (2013, 22). Autoethnography, they elucidate, emerged through the confluence of several trends in academia: “(1) a recognition of the limits of scientific knowledge and a growing appreciation for qualitative research; (2) a heightened concern about the ethics and politics of research; (3) a greater recognition of and appreciation for narrative, the literary and aesthetic, emotions and the body; and (4) the increased importance of social identities and identity politics” (2013, 25-6). They outline five main purposes of autoethnography: “(1) disrupting norms of research practice and representation; (2) working from insider knowledge; (3) maneuvering through pain, confusion, anger and uncertainty and making life better; (4) breaking silence/(re) claiming voice and writing to right; and (5) making work accessible” (2013, 32). While ethnomusicologists have long drawn on first-person accounts in their research, in the last twenty years scholars of music have begun to explore the possibilities of auto-ethnography that has opened up new possibilities for thinking about scholarly knowledge, dissemination, and ethics.

Queer theory emerged as an interdisciplinary field of study in the 1990s to critique pervasive heteronormativity, foreground the embodied experiences of LGBTQ+ people, and offer new perspectives on a whole range of issues, including family, reproductive rights and medicine, notions of identity, subcultures and social institutions, and understandings of temporality, performance and writing, to mention just a few topics. While LGBTQ+ historians from the 1970s attempted to recover queer pasts, queer scholars were shaped by poststructuralist thought and presented queerness as anti-identitarian and fundamentally opposed to normative and hegemonic thought, practices, and institutions, while itself enjoying more acceptance and inclusion in academic contexts over the last decades. A queer musicology emerged in the 1990s to uncover the queerness of the musical past and propose new ways of analysing, thinking about, and writing about music. Meanwhile, queer ethnomusicology has more recently addressed the diversity of queer musical spaces and identities in different global contexts, proposed new methods and research ethics, as well as questioning the euro-centrism of the term “queer”. But what can queer theory offer autoethnography, a field that is already anti-normative and experimental? How might queer autoethnography offer new possibilities for thinking about scholarly ethics and social justice? How have music scholars drawn on queer autoethnography to point to new ways of thinking about identity, activism, and ethics?

This space invites you to learn about queer autoethnograpy and its potentials for music scholarship. In Part 1 you are asked to delve into one of the founding tets of queer autoethnography to appreciate where it has emerged from. Part 2 asks you to evaluate the potentials of queer autoethnography in one specific case-study. Finally, Part 3 invites you to attend to words, form, and aesthetics of another example of queer autoethnography, in order to consider the nuts and bolts of writing autoethnographically.

<aside>

The learning outcomes of this space are:

  1. To be able to appreciate the aims and ethics of queer autoethnography.
  2. To be able to evaluate the potentials of queer autoethnographic research on music.
  3. To be able to understand the aesthetics of queer autoethnographic texts on music. </aside>

<aside>

Keywords: autoethnography; queer theory; writing; ethics; dissemination

</aside>

<aside>

Part 1

Read Holman & Harris (2018) and reflect on the questions below:

  1. What is autoethnography?
  2. What are the potentials, challenges, and ethics of autoethnography?
  3. Why does queerness need autoethnography? Why does autoethnography need queerness? </aside>

<aside>

Part 2

Read Fong (2024) and reflect on the questions below:

  1. What is Fong’s project and why does he turn to autoethnography as method?
  2. How effective do you think is autoethnography in making claims about opera, gender, and sexuality?
  3. What other methods could have been used and what would have been gained or lost? </aside>

<aside>

Part 3

Read Hilder (2023) and reflect on the questions below:

  1. How would you define Hilder’s text? An academic article? Memoir? Essay? Poem? And why?
  2. How does Hilder structure his text?
  3. What are the notable and surprising aesthetic features of Hilder’s writing? </aside>

Resources

Key Readings

Fong, Daniel X Y. 2024. "“Be a man!”: Embodied Auto-Narratives of the Effeminate Body in Opera." Lambda Nordica 29: 122-147.

Hilder, Thomas R. 2023. "Queer Choirs, Archives of the Self, and Finding Voice in the Refuge of the 1990s." QED A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 10 (3): 34-36.

Jones, Stacy Holman, and Anne M. Harris, eds. 2018. Queering Autoethnography. London: Routledge.

Additional Reading

Jones, Stacy Holman, Tony E. Adams, and Carolyn Ellis. 2013. Handbook of Autoethnography. London: Routledge.