Ethnomusicology beyond #MeToo: Listening for the Violences of the Field

Abstract

Abstract Responding to an increasing sense of urgency about sexual harassment and assault during ethnographic fieldwork in the era of #MeToo, this article offers a lesson plan for effecting systemic change in the discipline of ethnomusicology. We show how disciplinary assumptions about the field where harassment occurs reify colonizing histories of racial othering, reinscribe heteronormativity, and alternately conflate or erase specific types of violences. We identify feminist scholarly genealogies that provide alternate models for theorizing in and through personal experience. We argue that this analytical work cannot and must not be absent from the important questions of how we practically approach and prepare students for fieldwork in ethnomusicology.