‘This Is to Enrage You’

Abstract

The fundamental utility of rage as a motivator for early AIDS activists is contrasted with the double silencing marking ethnomusicology’s relationship to same-sex desire: it is virtually non-existent in the discipline’s literature, and the erasure has generated no response, enraged or otherwise, within academia. Additionally, two themes animating ensuing discussions are presented. First, the field’s belated acceptance of ‘gender’ as a site of inquiry, overwhelmingly used as a shorthand for ‘studies of/by women’, is revealed as related to the creation of a veneer of ‘diversity’ that functions to keep men/masculinity immune from examination. And second, ethnomusicology’s self-construction as the ethical other to musicology is exposed as resting not on epistemological/methodological desiderata, but an intense homophobic drive to construct a masculine disciplinary identity in contradistinction to musicology’s assumed femininity.