Diverse People in Special Places

Abstract

AbstractContextualized in relation to contemporary claims of a ‘post-racial’ society, as well as decolonial critique, the sudden appearance of queerness in ethnomusicological literature is examined. Rather than evidence of an inevitable meliorism or disciplinary evolution/enlightened thinking, the meeting of queerness and ethnomusicology is argued to be the result of several factors: the market’s exploitation of difference—including the variable of non-normative sexuality—in order to create economic profit (related to such strategies as ‘pinkwashing’ and ‘queer baiting’); the neoliberal university’s parallel exploitation and containment of difference as means to constructing the Western, academic sphere as modern, liberal, and progressive; and the metaepistemic compulsions and prohibitions common to both spheres that require an acceptance of ‘positive thinking’, concomitantly and conversely constructing critique as the enemy of a ‘progress’ ultimately measured in relation to capital.