Why “Political”?: Blackness and Queer Urban Geographies in Toronto and San Diego.
07/12/20 • 85 min
Dr. Sadie Hochman-Ruiz holds a PhD from the University of California, San Diego in the Department of Music’s Integrative Studies program. Her dissertation, “The Social Politics of Queer Drag: A Study of San Diego’s Queer Community and Queercore Subculture,” foregrounds an intersectional approach to womanhood, addressing homeland narratives and diasporic identities within a multiracial drag scene. Researching the project, she performed as the drag queen Sadie Pins and engaged creative research methods such as performance ethnography, public humanities and research justice. Her current research focuses on trans studies and transnational queer communities.
In her article, "Why Political?" Sadie unpacks the heavy racial baggage attached to doing queer work as it is currently defined. By including an origin story for queerness within queercore subculture, Sadie uses queercore sound––the soundtrack of queercore co-founder Bruce LaBruce's first feature film No Skin Off My Ass (1991)––to analyze the race and class dynamics of doing queer work. Sadie offers observations from shifts in art-practice as a performance ethnographer in which she responds to the challenges of marrying queer drag with its anti-racist and anti-capitalist intentions. This article brings together music studies, queer of colour critique and critical university studies in a way which centres performance-based work as a privileged site of critical intervention. With this work, Sadie encourages artist-researchers to rethink the relationship between the political intentions of their performance practice and the critical theory with which we isolate and claim those politics
Dr. Sadie Hochman-Ruiz holds a PhD from the University of California, San Diego in the Department of Music’s Integrative Studies program. Her dissertation, “The Social Politics of Queer Drag: A Study of San Diego’s Queer Community and Queercore Subculture,” foregrounds an intersectional approach to womanhood, addressing homeland narratives and diasporic identities within a multiracial drag scene. Researching the project, she performed as the drag queen Sadie Pins and engaged creative research methods such as performance ethnography, public humanities and research justice. Her current research focuses on trans studies and transnational queer communities.
In her article, "Why Political?" Sadie unpacks the heavy racial baggage attached to doing queer work as it is currently defined. By including an origin story for queerness within queercore subculture, Sadie uses queercore sound––the soundtrack of queercore co-founder Bruce LaBruce's first feature film No Skin Off My Ass (1991)––to analyze the race and class dynamics of doing queer work. Sadie offers observations from shifts in art-practice as a performance ethnographer in which she responds to the challenges of marrying queer drag with its anti-racist and anti-capitalist intentions. This article brings together music studies, queer of colour critique and critical university studies in a way which centres performance-based work as a privileged site of critical intervention. With this work, Sadie encourages artist-researchers to rethink the relationship between the political intentions of their performance practice and the critical theory with which we isolate and claim those politics
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Dr Chris Inglis talks about electro swing, an increasingly prominent genre which fuses the music of the swing era with that of the age of electronic dance music. Largely overlooked throughout the academic world so far, this research examines the genre’s place in today's popular music landscape, asking key questions about what the rise of this style may tell us about contemporary popular music, and society at large.
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The Search For The Blues
Diego Pani is the manager of the musical patrimony of the Istituto Superiore Regionale Etnografico (ISRE) and a Ph.D. candidate in Ethnomusicology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. His research focuses on the dynamics of music performance of young generations of musicians in reference to the use of media as a learning device, as well as the construction of social meaning via audio and audiovisual materials in the vernacular traditions and popular music scenes of Sardinia island, Italy. Additionally, he is engaged in the production of documentary films, web documentaries, and photo reportages.
The Search’ which is one of Diego's current documentary projects. Every year, hundreds of blues musicians from all over the world participate in the International Blues Challenge, a contest that takes place in many clubs of Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee. The festival offers musicians and blues music fans an opportunity to embark on a journey to the deep south of the United States, the land that gave birth to many legendary bluesmen and that has experienced the most crucial season in the history of this music. The Search is the story of a journey made in the Deep South by two Sardinian musicians, the Sardinian duo Don Leone. Travelling between Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana, it portrays a cultural landscape still anchored to the memory of those iconic musicians who inhabited the cities and countryside of this enormous piece of America. In the audiovisual material collected, the experience of two young Sardinian musicians is represented in opposition to one of the musicians, organizers, researchers who live in the deep south of the United States, characters deeply linked to those historical places of music-making. Inside this framework, emerges a contemporary musical context that is both related to local communities of musicians and massive musical tourism. This is the main scenario in which Don Leone travels for the first time, scratching the surface of a complex musical world, in search of the Blues
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