English and Cultural Studies

In a neoliberal moment of cultural production marked by commodification and the dominance of economic values, it is necessary to investigate the cultural, social, and aesthetic value of art. By examining Herbert Marcuse’s aesthetic dimension, this article seeks to locate the political and pedagogic potential both in the aesthetics and in the social contextualization of art. There are
several historical methods of subverting the market and of art-making that resonate politically, although a more contemporary phenomenon of forming new collective processes demarcates new spaces of resistance and alternative forms of sociality and creativity in light of neoliberal cultural forces and the pressures of individualization.

Queen Victoria was the namesake, the very face, of the latter half of the nineteenth century. ‘Neo-Victoria’, on the other hand, is a memory of the Queen by means of which we sustain her relevance even into the new millennium – via such biopics as Jean-Marc Vallée’s The Young Victoria (2009) and, more recently, Tom Vaughan’s ITV series Victoria (2016). This paper compares Victorian and neo-Victorian accounts of the Queen on the basis of underlying tropes and discourses of domestic femininity. In the nineteenth century, Victoria was portrayed as the consummate bourgeois wife and imperial mother to coloniser and colonised alike (Voskuil 2004: 170); at present, a Neo-Victoria is introduced as a reaction against her progenitor’s projected wifely submissiveness, but, curiously, not against the imperial meaning inscribed in her maternal role. Neo-Victoria’s vestigial imperialism, I argue, is at least an impediment to Vallée’s project of retrospectively empowering Victorian femininity or re-envisioning the nineteenth century in a postcolonial global context. The Young Victoria, in particular, seeks to redress Victorian patriarchy but in the end invigorates a residual nostalgia for imperial Britain.

With a performance style that combined elements of traditional Black masculine culture, feminine musical aesthetics and an ever-present element of homoeroticism, the boy bands of the late 1990s changed our society's concepts of acceptable adolescent masculinity. This paper, featured in national and international media, deconstructs boy band performance style to better understand a pivotal cultural moment for masculine ideals in North America and Europe.

Pragmatic and assimilationist ideals permeate contemporary gay culture. Even gay male music participation, Michael Joseph Gross argues in The Atlantic, fetishizes normalcy. According to Gross, current generations of gay men are indifferent to the veneration of female icons - an important aspect of gay male identity of the past. The queen, he argues, referring to the gay man who emulates, adores and identifies with a female icon, is dead. Not a moment too soon, he believes, because queens of previous generations are “emblems of weakness” (70). In this paper, I challenge these assertions and, using ethnographic research, show that veneration of female icons remains an integral aspect of gay identity for many gay men. Far from being inconsequential to contemporary gay culture, this form of gay music fandom permits a type of queer relationality that challenges the normative gender and sexual politics present in the contemporary lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) movement and preserves the notion of queerness as critique of normative ideals. I turn to the past, specifically opera queen fandom and its relevance to gay male culture in the mid to late twentieth century, as a point of reference for gay male cross-gender music fandom and identificatory practices. Subsequently, through answers provided to an ethnographic survey created specifically for this project, I analyse the experiences of self-identified obsessed gay male fans of popular music artist Lady Gaga. I take up José Esteban Muñoz’s recent work on queer futurity and the utopian potential of the aesthetic realm to argue that the actions of gay males, even the seemingly quotidian actions of music fandom and participation, have the ability to reformulate the present and queer the future.

Pragmatic and assimilationist ideals permeate contemporary gay culture: Michael Joseph Gross in The Atlantic, for instance, argues that gay male participation in music culture still fetishizes normativity. According to Gross, the current generation of gay men is indifferent to the veneration of female icons, an important aspect of gay male identity of the past. In this article I challenge these assertions. Using ethnographic research with fans of Lady Gaga, the article shows that for many gay men the continuing veneration of female icons remains an integral aspect of gay identity. Animated by the incredible work of José Esteban Muñoz, explore gay male music fandom of the past and of the present to imagine a potential queer future.

One officer stared at a naked gay detainee for minutes before asking: "what's wrong faggot? Lost for words?"

Article on Toronto's bathhouse raids, the political response, and the sense of plurality therein, published in the new and awesome GUTS: A Canadian Feminist Magazine. Available here: http://gutsmagazine.ca/slider/no-shit

In this article, I listen closely to Rae Spoon, Vivek Shraya and Kaleb Roberston's (as Ms. Fluffy Soufflé) cover performance of " Insensitive, " a song most commonly associated with Jann Arden. Through their cover, Spoon, Shraya and Soufflé work to fissure linear progressive temporality— often and aggressively associated with certain queer experiences in Canadian culture—both in the sense that their cover itself is a musical return and in its specific musical details. I show that there is political potential in listening experiences that open alternative temporal experiences. Their collective project simultaneously renders audible an unlikely musical geneal-ogy and encourages listeners to glean a sense of queer plurality in a national context that increasingly privileges individualism. Their re-imagining of " Insensitive " allows us to hear a type of musical virtuosity when vocal performance is untethered from strict heteronormative gender performance and transforms the popular tune from a solo lament into a collective queer anthem.

Dans cet article, j'analyse les reprises de la chanson « Insensitive », le plus sou-vent associée à Jann Arden, par Rae Spoon, Vivek Shraya et Kaleb Roberston (Ms. Fluffy Soufflé). Les nouvelles versions de la chanson par Spoon, Shraya et Soufflé brisent essentiellement la progression linéaire temporelle – très fortement associée à certaines personnalités queer canadiennes –, car la reprise comme procédé musical est en soi un retour et, car certains détails des oeuvres rejoignent ce thème. Je montre que certaines expériences auditives renferment un potentiel politique : celui d'ouvrir des expériences temporelles alternatives. Leur projet collectif rend audible simultanément une généalogie musicale inattendue et encourage les audi-trices et auditeurs à tirer un sens de pluralité queer dans un contexte national d'individualisme grandissant. Leur reprise de « Insensitive » fait par ailleurs mon-tre d'une certaine virtuosité musicale quand la voix est libérée des strictes normes genrées hétéronormatives pour transformer une chanson mieux connue comme complainte solo en hymne queer.

“It’s gay pride, not black pride”—a spectator’s claim during the 2016 Toronto Pride Parade as quoted in the Globe and Mail—is emblematic of the vitriolic response to a brief sit-in by Black Lives Matter-Toronto (BLM) that halted one of the world’s largest Pride Parades for thirty minutes. Before ending their protest, BLM made nine demands of Pride’s organizers. Although over-shadowed by the more sensationalized request to curb police participation in Pride, six of BLM’s nine demands relate to fostering sites of music participation for LGBTQ people of color, including a call to reinstate a stage for South Asian music performance and additional funding for Blockorama, a dance music party for queer African diasporic people.

Such requests underscore that many queer people of color consider participation in music cultures to be vital to recognizing themselves as part of a larger community. To be sure, bodies listening and moving together on the dance floor can be evidence of queer lives and queer power. Historically, underground dance venues are spaces where queers can explore ideas of identity and community (see, for example, Fikentscher, Lawrence, Echols, Dyer).

BLM’s requests, then, seem to fit into the broader theme of the parade, in which participants honored the victims murdered at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando by carrying placards bearing the names and ages of victims and halting at 3PM to observe a moment of silence in their memory.

Unfortunately, public reactions to BLM’s demands suggest that music spaces in which queer people of color gather are understood as inconsequential to larger projects of LGBTQ politics—and that many Canadians still think of gayness as necessarily coupled with whiteness. Sue-Ann Levy, of the National Post, argued that this year’s parade was “in memory of the victims of the Orlando massacre” not “allowing one loud group to make a political statement.”

Published responses, which ignore the intersection of race and sexuality and reify the hegemonic whiteness of LGBTQ narratives, are unsurprising given that these BLM activists comprise part of a long lineage of queer activists of color who have been erased from the stories we tell about LGBTQ politics. In fact, many attendees and participants at Toronto Pride may have been unaware of the fact that most people killed at Pulse were racialized Latinx queers.

What is lost in this discourse is that BLM’s protest is precisely what the massacre at Pulse requires of us: to make an aggressive stand for spaces in which queer people of color can amass as a collective under the pulsing rhythms of dance music and to recognize the political potential of such gatherings.

And as music scholars we must also teach the erroneousness of claims that these spaces can ever be disconnected from the social politics articulated by people of color.

The affective charge of queer collectivity is regularly predicated on black and latinx musical traditions and forms of social dance that come out of communities of color. Moments of togetherness on the dance floors at Toronto Pride 2016 were undeniably made possible by the labor, traditions, and genealogies of black and brown bodies. This should alter our understanding of these pasts, change how we conceptualize LGBTQ experience in the present, and enable more just collective visions for the future.

Queer music scholarship must lead this initiative and teach, widely and voraciously, how to hear these politics.

In today's culture, popular music is a vital site where ideas about gender and sexuality are imagined and disseminated. Popular Music and the Politics of Hope: Queer and Feminist Interventions explores what that means with a wide-ranging collection of chapters that consider the many ways in which contemporary pop music performances of gender and sexuality are politically engaged and even radical. With analyses rooted in feminist and queer thought, contributors explore music from different genres and locations, including Beyoncé's Lemonade, A Tribe Called Red's We Are the Halluci Nation, and celebrations of Vera Lynn's 100th Birthday. At a bleak moment in global politics, this collection focuses on the concept of critical hope: the chapters consider making and consuming popular music as activities that encourage individuals to imagine and work toward a better, more just world. Addressing race, class, aging, disability, and colonialism along with gender and sexuality, the authors articulate the diverse ways popular music can contribute to the collective political projects of queerness and feminism. With voices from senior and emerging scholars, this volume offers a snapshot of today's queer and feminist scholarship on popular music that is an essential read for students and scholars of music and cultural studies.

In his 2013 song "More Than Aware," Montreal/Toronto-based performer Kanwar Anit Singh--better known by his stage name Sikh Knowledge--asks his listeners: "Do you know what love means to a fag like me?" In the song that follows this opening query, Saini both elucidates and complicates his lived experiences as a queer person of colour in Canada who is indelibly marked by his turban. In this song, Saini culls together a complicated portrait of queer diasporic identity, sounding the contested intersections among race, religion, and sexuality in contemporary Canadian culture. He presents a dense musical collage that speaks to (and challenges) contemporary political concerns around difference and belonging. "More Than Aware" participates in the broader project of his 2013 EP Turban Sex, which he describes in the promotional materials for the album as an attempt to bring together "the sound of the East and West Indies infused with EDM and Dancehall...[and] marry these musical traditions, queer subcultures, and the marginal attitudes of those adorning themselves in varied cultural garb." With this album, Saini joins a chorus of queer people of colour marked by cultural and religious garments who re-assert their existence and experience in a world that disallows complicated ways such identities may intersect and inform one another.

This essay examines the Canadian government's  official apology for the institutional failings of the state to prevent the 1985 Air India bombings and the mistreatment of the Air India families after the crash in relation to fictional emembrances of the Air India bombings. It argues that the government's apology, in seeking to offer redress, functions as a tool of the state to manage the grief and grievance of racialized minorities. Fictional remembrances of the AI tragedy, on the other hand, trace a long history of racialized subjects living with loss and grief and resisting the government’s push toward closure.

This essay examines how the Bollywood film "Swades" (Gowariker 2004) mobilizes a discourse of shame to reorient Indian diasporic communities toward the homeland and, in the process, urges them to invest affectively and financially—or, better yet, to return physically to India. By revealing possibilities for non-resident Indians to inaugurate new relations with the world left behind, "Swades" prods Indian diasporic viewers to rethink their relations to the homeland. The construction of shame within "Swades" is part of a complex address to those diasporic communities who consume Bollywood products through an affect of nostalgia and whose economic investment proves necessary to the continuation of Bollywood's free enterprise and to India's economic development.