Situated in the context of current examinations of academic disciplinarity, this article contributes to the decades-long discussions (or debates) regarding the status of ethnomusicology, arguing forcefully for the (sub-)discipline’s cessation. A focus on ethnomusicology’s very prefix, “ethn-”, exposes the field’s historical and continuing reliance upon colonialist ideology, continually reproduced in relation to both ethnicity (constructed in relation to interrelated discourses of authenticity, technology, and gender) and ethnography. Highlighting the extent to which a field-defining ideological-methodological matrix has led to the production of a theoretical narrowness predicated upon and engendering the construction of “Others,” it is commitment to inter-, trans-, or post-disciplinarity (rather than disciplinary dogmatism) that is shown to promise a vital and relevant space for explorations of sound and music within current and future university spaces. Ultimately, given the inherent restrictions and limitations suggested by prefixes or qualifiers of any sort, it is the appellation musicology that may best serve as a (provisional) marker for interdisciplinary inquiry, its very re-appropriation (from its own historical circumscriptions) serving as an act rife with symbolic significance.

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This epilogue reflects on what has changed and what has remained the same with respect to the LGBT landscape in post-Soviet Russia. It begins with a discussion of the death of Igor' Kon, an academic, public intellectual, and activist who played a key role in efforts to depathologize homosexuality in post-Soviet space. It then considers Russian politics and how Russian gay men have remained apolitical in their stances, along with their reactions to the Legislation against Gay Propaganda passed in 2013. It also examines the proliferation of websites addressed to gay and lesbian audiences and how the dramatic growth in internet accessibility has impacted homosexual men. Furthermore, it highlights the increase in sounds and images of some of Russia's popular music performers of (assumed) netraditsionnaia orientatsiia, as well as the ways in which they present the (homo)eroticized male body. The epilogue ends by focusing on Russian activists' campaign to have a gay parade celebrated in the country and suggests that popular music may be regarded as Russia's gay parade.

This chapter explores the relationship between Russian gay men and both Western and Russian popular musics by focusing on specific harmonic and melodic musical attributes that contribute to a Russian “sound.” In particular, it considers the link between sound and listener to experiences of (pleasurable) penetration. It shows that Russian homosexuality imparts a certain prestige (marked by modernity, style, and internationality) upon a cultural product. It also reveals that Russian gay men professed a preference for Western popular music and Western music in general, even as many of them also admitted a connection to Russian popular musics. Finally, it examines the connections between music, penetrations, and the homosexual body in the context of politics. The chapter suggests that lived experience—apprehended, in part, as a porosity of borders and operating as both a material and conceptual dynamic—inflects the interaction between Russian gay men and audible culture.