Intersectionality and Music Analysis: An Introduction

Sponsored by the Committee on the Status of Women

Jan Miyake (Oberlin Conservatory & Conservatory), Chair and Organizer
Lori Burns (University of Ottawa), Nadine Hubbs (University of Michigan), Alisha Lola Jones, (Indiana University), Presenters

"Over the next two years, CSW will sponsor sessions that facilitate scholarship impacted by the concept of intersectionality. Our 90-minute 2021 session will be educational in nature with the goal of introducing our attendees to the topic and its methodological uses. This 2021 session acts as a precursor to the planned 2022 session, which will highlight new analytical work incorporating the concept of intersectionality.

In the 2021 session, we will be joined by three distinguished panelists: Lori Burns (a music theorist at the University of Ottawa whose interdisciplinary research merges cultural theory and musical analysis to explore representations of gender and sexuality in the lyrical, musical, and visual texts of popular music), Nadine Hubbs (a musicologist, gender-sexuality and class theorist, and cultural historian at the University of Michigan) and Alisha Jones (an ethnomusicologist from Indiana University whose fields of publication include gender and sexuality as well as religious music in the African diaspora). Each panelist will provide a ten-minute presentation on the topic of how they (or their specific subfield/field) define “intersectionality” and how an intersectional perspective assists in music analysis. A moderated discussion that will include space for Q&A will occupy the remainder of the time."