My first book project, Sonic Femmeness: Black Culture Makers, Felt History, and Vibrational Identity, is under contract with Duke University Press. Sonic Femmeness moves with the sounds, affects, vibrations, and visuals of a handful of contemporary Black synth-forward, experimental pop artists—Blood Orange, Janelle Monáe, FKA twigs, Dawn Richard, and Erika de Casier—to propose femmeness as a mode of being, one grounded in characteristics socially devalued for being too “Black,” “feminine,” or “queer.” By entering through the materialities of the aforementioned artists’ music, Sonic Femmeness posits that the sonic, along with the affective and the vibrational, offers additional entry points (to visuality) through which we can embody femmeness. At the same time, it sits with the historical contexts that make the sonic femmeness under my careful study indubitably Black—and therefore something that non-Black people and especially white people can only come to begin to know through listening and feeling with Black queer femmes. By bringing in vignettes of my experiences with these artists as a white queer AFAB nonbinary masc-of-center person from a third generation, Jersey City (NJ)-based Italian American family, I bring a self-reflective lens to the (necessarily) increasing number of white scholars engaging with Black studies, Black sound studies, and queer/trans of color critique, all in the name of more actively engaging with what Hortense Spillers calls “the construction and invention of ‘America,’” from both within and outside of academia.
In terms of historiography, Sonic Femmeness listens with both these contemporary artists and some of their influences from the recent past (Prince, Grace Jones, Missy Elliott, and Janet Jackson) from a moment of literal and figurative femmicide, where both white heteropatriarchy and the individuals who maintain it continue to harm or murder Black femmes and femmes of color. Just as importantly, it registers the ways that the Black femmes who survive find ways to unapologetically thrive, particularly in the realms of music, television, art, and politics. Sonic Femmeness traces how Black music’s sounds, affects, and vibrations navigate in between the cracks of a fascist political landscape that rallies against “critical race theory,” reproductive rights, gun-free publics, bathrooms and pronouns, and any kind of true social safety net, building worlds in what Jayna Brown calls utopia, or a “state of being and doing” in the now. In this vein, it understands the recent past (the 1980s/1990s) as extending into our present, as being both “the past” and also very much still with us, a set of experiences and affectivities that we can listen and learn with instead of constantly reinventing the wheel with every new queer and trans generation. Through placing a prelude before each chapter (Prince-Blood Orange, Grace Jones-Janelle Monáe, Missy Elliott-FKA twigs, Janet Jackson-Dawn Richard), it invites readers to engage with these Black queer femme recent pasts as part of the fabric of our present. Through a midway bridge about POSE, Paris Is Burning, and Diana Ross, Sonic Femmeness further unpacks the stakes of our attuning to sonic femmeness right now—and not later.
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I have also begun work on my second book project, which is tentatively entitled Rhythm Work: Black Rhythms, White Worlds, and Collective Reimaginings. This second book project builds on the work in my article “Adrian Piper, Kelela, and the Necessity of Rhythm Work,” which was published in women & performance: a journal of feminist theory in October 2023. There, I conceptualize rhythm work as “what happens when the beats of music come into contact with the beats of bodies—and the vibrations collide and then recircuit into new rhythmic possibilities.” In this book project, I am interested in thinking about the rhythms of music alongside the rhythms of other kinds of creative practices, such as art-making, museum curation, and television soundtracking and soundscaping. In chapters about Kate Bush covers (by U.S. Girls, FKA twigs, and Maxwell); the Toronto experimental pop scene (with focus on the music of Austra, U.S. Girls, and Debby Friday); Lorraine O’Grady, Simone Leigh, and the art gallery remix; Star Trek: Discovery and Blacking, queering, and transing the traditional Star Trek mold; and Black dance parties creating and holding ground in increasingly white cities (Set De Flo and Ascen.dance in New Orleans, Hood Rave and DJ Rose Gawd events in Los Angeles), I explore both how Black rhythms (however ephemerally) reimagine the political-cultural landscape and what happens when white and generally non-Black artists actively engage with Black rhythms. I posit that both kinds of rhythm work are necessary for reimagining our worlds.
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As an Andrew W. Mellon Engaged Scholar Initiative Fellow from 2017-2020, I organized the Synth Sounds of the Texas Triangle summer symposium, which included performances by electronic music artists from Austin, Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio. These sessions accentuated how anti-Black and anti-Latinx racism and white supremacy more broadly continue in both Texas and America even after monuments come down. The symposium additionally explored how music can be a space for anti-racism and solidarity building across lines of race, gender, and sexuality. You can watch the Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, and Austin sessions via the links.