Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T23:35:13.788Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A natural ear for music? Hearing (dis)abled masculinities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 October 2009

CASSANDRA LOESER  and
VICKI CROWLEY
CASSANDRA LOESER
Affiliation:
Academic Development Research Education, Learning and Teaching Unit, University of South Australia, St Bernards Road, Magill, SA, Australia, 5072 E-mail: [email protected]
VICKI CROWLEY
Affiliation:
Communications and Gender Studies, School of Communication, International Studies and Languages, University of South Australia, St Bernards Road, Magill, SA, Australia, 5072 E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Musical performances on the bass guitar, able to be felt bodily beyond the ear, connect into the many layers of affect that music excites; but they are particularly potent as a means of communicating embodied masculinity for one young man with a hearing disability. Masculinity as a social code enacted within practices of the everyday involves both the affect and the effect of difference. The bass guitar, the instrument which drives a band's sound and rhythm, is part of the performativity of masculinity within popular music – visually, and at the level of sound, as auricular materiality – an embodied sensation where the ‘feel’ of sound through the body constitutes a language in which ‘desirable’ and ‘undesirable’ modes of masculinity become appropriated and defined.

Displays of musical prowess on the bass guitar open a space for becoming ‘unfixed’ from the identity and abject status of the hearing-disabled Other. This ‘Othering’ occurs primarily in everyday spoken encounters where difficulties with hearing and speech limit opportunities for occupying a viable masculine positioning. By contrast, the capacity to ‘fit’ the sensory and sensual prompts that trigger recognition of masculinity within popular music enables the re-assembling of an embodied masculine identity for a hearing-disabled young man. Masculinity and disability are rendered reversible and exchangeable – performative productions that are excessive and transgressive, contingent on the sensory perceptions of self and others.

This emphasis on embodied communicative practice through the play of bass guitar provides an important counterweight to representational forms of embodied gendered subjectivity that continue to predominate in some modes of disability and gender theorising. It constitutes a forceful assertion of how everyday embodied interactions are irrevocably coupled with mobile and transient masculine and disabled aesthetic identifications.

Type
Articles
Information
Popular Music , Volume 28 , Special Issue 3: Popular Music and Disability , October 2009 , pp. 411 - 423
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

References

Bakhtin, M.M. [1930] 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Holquist, M., trans. Emerson, C. and Holquist, M. (Austin and London, University of Texas Press)Google Scholar
Bakhtin, M.M. [1930] [1941], 1965. Rabelais and His World, trans. Iswolsky, H. (Bloomington, Indiana University Press)Google Scholar
Buchbinder, D. 1994. Masculinities and Identities (Carlton, Melbourne University Press)Google Scholar
Buchbinder, D. 1998. Performance Anxieties: Reproducing Masculinity (NSW, St. Leonards)Google Scholar
Butler, J. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, Routledge)Google Scholar
Butler, J. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (London, Routledge)Google Scholar
Clifford, J. 2000. ‘Taking identity politics seriously: the contradictory, stony ground’, in Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall, ed. Hall, S., Gilroy, P., Grossberg, L and McRobbie, A. (New York, Verso), pp. 94–112Google Scholar
Cobain, K. 1998. Kurt Cobain's Biography, http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Venue/6582/Nirvana/kurt-biography.htmlGoogle Scholar
Connell, R.W. 1987. Gender and Power (Cambridge, Polity Press)Google Scholar
Connell, R.W. 1995. Masculinities (St. Leonards, Allen & Unwin)Google Scholar
Connell, R.W. 2000. The Men and the Boys (St Leonards, Allen & Unwin)Google Scholar
Dyer, R. 1997. White (London, Routledge)Google Scholar
Epstein, S. 1994. ‘A queer encounter: sociology and the study of sexuality’, Sociological Theory, 12/2, pp. 188–202Google Scholar
Halberstam, J. 1998. Female Masculinity (Durham, Duke University Press)Google Scholar
Halberstam, J. 2005. In a Queer Time & Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York, Duke University Press)Google Scholar
Harris, I.M. 1995. Messages Men Hear: Constructing Masculinities (London, Taylor and Francis)Google Scholar
Hebdige, D. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London, Methuen)Google Scholar
Loeser, C. 2002. ‘Bounded bodies, mobile selves: the significance of the muscular body in young hearing-impaired men's constructions of masculinity’, in Manning the Next Millennium: Studies in Masculinities, ed. Pearce, S. and Muller, V. (Curtin University of Technology, Black Swan Press), pp. 55–68Google Scholar
Loeser, C. 2005. Embodiment, Ethics and the Ear: Constructions of Masculine Subjectivity by Young Men with Hearing Disabilities in Contemporary Australia, Ph.D. thesis (South Australia, University of South Australia)Google Scholar
Loeser, C., and Crowley, V. 2006. ‘Audible acts: hearing (dis)abled masculinities’, in What A Man's Gotta Do?, ed. Bollen, J., Kiernander, A. and Parr, B. (NSW, Centre for Australian Language, Literature, Theatre and Screen Studies), pp. 222–240Google Scholar
Mac an Ghaill, M. 1994. The Making of Men: Masculinities, Sexualities and Schooling (Buckingham, Open University Press)Google Scholar
McClary, S. 1991. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press)Google Scholar
Mercer, K. 1994. Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York, Routledge)Google Scholar
Morrison, T. 1993. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (London, Picador)Google Scholar
Neuman, W. 2000. Social Research Methods: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches, 4th edn (Boston, Allyn & Bacon)Google Scholar
Petersen, A. 1998. Unmasking the Masculine: ‘Men’ and ‘Identity’ in a Sceptical Age (London, Sage)Google Scholar
Regev, M. 1997. ‘Rock aesthetics and musics of the world’, Theory, Culture & Society, 14/3, pp. 125–142Google Scholar
Riggs, D. 2006. Priscilla (White) Queen of the Desert: Queer Rights/Race Privilege (New York, Peter Lang)Google Scholar
Riggs, M.T. 1989. Tongues Untied, 55 minutes, written and produced by M.T. Riggs (USA, Peter Lang)Google Scholar
Rose, N. 2000. ‘Identity, Genealogy, History’, in Identity: A Reader, ed. du Gay, P., Evans, J. and Redman, P. (London, Sage and the Open University), pp. 311–324Google Scholar
Schippers, M. 2000. ‘The social organization of sexuality and gender in alternative hard rock: an analysis of intersectionality’, Gender & Society, 14/6, pp. 747–764Google Scholar
Stecopoulos, H., and Uebel, M. (eds.) 1997. Race and the Subject of Masculinities (Durham and London, Duke University Press)Google Scholar
Taylor, J. 2007. ‘The music of kings and bio queens’, in Kritikos: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal of Postmodern Cultural Sound Text and Image, 4, http://intertheory.org/jtaylor.htmGoogle Scholar
Whitehead, S.M., and Barnett, F. (eds.) 2001. The Masculinities Reader (Cambridge, Polity Press)Google Scholar
Yang, W. 1997. Friends of Dorothy (Australia, Pan Macmillan)Google Scholar

Discography

Nirvana, In Utero. David Geffen Company produced with special arrangement with Sub Pop Records GEFD-24536. 1993Google Scholar
Red Hot Chili Peppers, Mothers Milk. EMI-USA, A division of Capitol Records Inc 7 92152-2. 1989Google Scholar