(No) Body/(No) Homo

Abstract

This chapter explores one of the most significant animating forces shared by ethnomusicology and queerness: the ambivalence toward and inadequate engagement of the material, experiencing, sensate/sensual body, an extraordinarily rich site for explorations of sex/uality, auditory expressive culture, and the social. Highlighting the extent to which the ideological/discursive (often wedded to identity and/or politics) results in a desexualization/despecification of desire in both disciplines, it is argued that it is exactly embodied homosexual desire, so anathema to ethnomusicology, that is needed to discomfit and thus dislodge the discipline’s deep homophobic structuring. Ultimately, an embrace of the erotic, and the corporeally sexual, offers myriad possibilities for exploring the complexities of sexuality, race, and multiple sociocultural dynamics occluded by the decades-long, nearly exclusive focus on the textual/discursive.