Queer and Trans Music Therapy
NewsIntroducing a new publication from Oxford Music Press:
The Oxford Handbook of Queer and Trans Music Therapy
Edited by Colin Andrew Lee
Explores queer and trans issues in music therapy, an emerging and rapidly evolving topic
Includes contributions from leaders in the field, benefitting from the unique intersecting identities of contributors.
The price is an elitist £145.
If “queer” is here being used to mean the same as “gay” (though in some quarters now it is used as equivalent to the indefinite “LGBTQIA2+…” initialism), one wonders why gay and trans are treated in the same volume. After all, they are very different, so two different volumes would be appropriate. It’s as though someone thought a single volume relating to Jews and Roman Catholics made sense.
It is not, happy to help.
You would be much more helpful if you could give reason for your answer.
Well, for one, some people identify as “queer” separately from being gay, lesbian, bisexual, etc. Even in the acronym “LGBTQ”, queer is separate from gay/lesbian, which gives a pretty clear hint.
Second, the handbook description itself answers the question, which you could have easily found with a 10-second google search: “The Oxford Handbook of Queer and Trans Music Therapy (QTMT) is a celebration of queer, trans, bisexual and gender nonconforming identities and the spontaneous creativity that is at the heart of queer music-making.”
Third, there is an established academic field of Queer Theory which is not about Queer people in themselves, but about structures of thought, questioning mainstream binaries, etc. It is not uncommon in social sciences, including in my field of International security (one example: what does it mean to think of a military drone pilot as “unmanned”?). The Handbook explicitly engages with this field of inquiry, something the description again makes clear.
“A celebration…”? This sounds like hype rather than scholarship.
Yes, and a retiring professor might be honoured by a “Festschrift” – also not scholarship?
A Handbook may “celebrate” the scholarly contributions of a field of inquiry or of research. That’s what it’s for – ‘here’s what QTMT does and why it’s useful.’
“some people identify as “queer” separately from being gay, lesbian, bisexual, etc”
Are these the ones known as “spicy straights”?
Your first para gives us contradictory information. First you cite a version of the indefinite acronym to tell us that queer is different from gay; then you cite the handbook’s description of itself which, as you quote it, doesn’t mention gay, so we are left to conclude that “queer” = or includes “gay”.
Queer Theory may be “established”, but that does not mean it may not be a mare’s nest. Sometimes I think that some people get a buzz out of calling themselves queer just so that they can feel themselves to be outsider-revolutionaries, not academics in cosy positions who can marry someone else of the same sex now.
I should have thought that whatever was meant by speaking of a military drone pilot as unnmanned, it had something to do with no human being on board or not currently governing its movements and in any case did not need Queer Theory for its elucidation.
Well, you think wrong on each single one of those paragraphs, well done.
As for the last one, indeed, “unmanning” redefines the position of the pilot to danger, war, risk, military virtue, and manliness. In short, “queering” the pilot, in some ways. If you want to find out more, might I suggest the Metropolitan Opera’s season opener next September.
“As for the last one, indeed, “unmanning” redefines the position of the pilot to danger, war, risk, military virtue, and manliness. In short, “queering” the pilot, in some ways. ”
What does it mean, to “redefine[s] the position of the pilot to danger…manliness”?
And how does that amount to ‘queering’ the pilot? Why is the notion of queering needed at all here?
BtW, I do NOT think wrong on each single one of those paragraphs. Do you really think that your asserting it demonstrates it? Golly!
I shan’t be crossing the Atlantic to see the show you refer to, and in any case I don’t know if it would enable me to “find out more”.
Well!! Let’s hope it’s not the only qualification they ever get!!!
They should have stopped with LGB, the rest are nonsense. As Woody Allen proclaimed, bisexual is best, it doubles your chance of a date on a Saturday night.
Why not buy a copy, engage with the content, and share your findings here?
because it costs a whopping £145
It’s a little surprising that you would choose two abrahamic religions for your analogy. After all, they share a common origin as well as several religious texts. Mentioning both in a single volume on “Abrahamic Religions” probably wouldn’t be all that strange.
I wonder if someone got a PHD for this…
You don’t get a PhD for contributing to a handbook – you get it for a work of independent, original research, which a handbook by definition is not. Contributors, normally, will hold PhDs already, for work in this field specifically or a connected one.
Signed, a PhD holder and OUP Handbook contributor.
The principal problem with these proliferating Oxford Handbooks is not the topics, but the fact that most of the contributions don’t go through the sort of rigorous double-blind peer review that is standard for the most prestigious academic journals. For the contributors it’s an easier route to adding another publication to their C.V. and for the editors it’s a way to get their name on a big fat book, but the quality of the scholarship is very uneven. And Oxford University Press is incentivizing this in order to generate more content that it sells for exorbitant prices. The substantive consequence for the research field in general is that quality is succumbing to quantity. The Routledge Companions are another example of this unfortunate trend.
Agree and even once respected publications can descend into murky depths when taken over by woke fanatics. This happened to Scientific American which abandoned science when it addressed trans gender medicine.
https://disinformationchronicle.substack.com/p/bmj-slaps-down-scientific-americans
I agree entirely. But then they are not meant to offer original contributions to knowledge – they’re meant to summarize and outline the current state of the field. Some of the fields, however, are getting rather narrow (including the one I’m contributing to). But then, contributors aren’t paid, so we might at least get some CV credit out of it.
Handbooks like that are mostly about feeding subscription databases nowadays, not to sell books – and if they become useful to final-year undergraduates or masters’ students writing dissertations, or if individual chapters can serve as teaching resources, they’ll have served their purpose.
Oxford Handbooks Online is a subscription database.
And let’s not forget Yale, an academic house which (at least in the UK) has published books that failed peer review. Under a “university press” imprint.
“…an emerging and rapidly evolving topic.”
Indeed. As rapidly as it can be made up.
Hey Eric, Judith Butler wrote Gender Trouble nearly 35 years ago. This isn’t new, it’s just new to you. Queer people, including non-binary people and trans people, have existed since time immemorial. Plato’s Symposium argued that love between men was the highest form of love. Philo of Alexandria documented Roman trans individuals in the 1st Century C.E., writing “Expending every possible care on their outward adornment, they are not ashamed even to employ every device to change artificially their nature as men into women.” Art preserved in Pompeii by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius documented same-sex relationships. A Sumerian creation myth described the creation of male, female, and intersex humans. The Ramayana epic poem describes the Hijra members of Rama’s followers who do not obey when he instructs “all you men and women” to return to the city Ayodhya, because they were neither men nor women.
Some educational reading for you on trans, non-binary, genderfluid, and otherwise not cisgender individuals from the last four centuries:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas(ine)_Hall
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Hyde,_3rd_Earl_of_Clarendon#Alleged_cross-dressing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Dürrge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevalier_d%27%C3%89on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herculine_Barbin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Universal_Friend
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Lobdell
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Cashier
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Thompson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennie_June_(autobiographer)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Countess_(courtesan)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Hall_(politician)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lili_Elbe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_M._Baer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_L._Hart
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Tipton
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Dillon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberta_Cowell
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Ulane
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zden%C4%9Bk_Koubek
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Carlos
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Jorgensen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsha_P._Johnson
Even so, gay and trans are different and so shouldn’t be lumped together. It has never crossed my mind that I might belong to the other sex, nor has it crossed my husband’s mind.
Human amorous sensitivities are quite fluid at the edges. To label people that way, to turn them into ‘letter people’, is dehumanizing, focussing upon what they think they are instead of upon what they say or do. It is another form of group think.
‘Identity politics’ are protofascistic: also in nazism, the basic view on people was ‘what they are’.
Music therapy for identity politics is crazy.
Well said sir! This constant labelling of everything and everyone is becoming more than a bit tiresome.
Why anyone should want to read this other than a very small number of interested academics is quite beyond me. I bet even quite a few of them will stifle a yawn or two as well.
Not very long ago at all it was ‘LGB’ now the thing takes up the best part of a page on its own and is showing no signs of stopping.
It’s far more dehumanizing to belittle queer people as “letter people” who don’t know who they are but rather “think they are” something, and diminish queer-led issues and books as “identify politics” and “protofascistic”. I think the fact that this book upsets you so much must be a ringing endorsement.
“It’s far more dehumanizing to belittle queer people as “letter people”…”
Meaning by “queer”?
Your previous comment shows you are either trying to stir the pot with purposefully inaccurate definitions or are just ignorant.
I am neither ignorant nor have I offered “purposefully inaccurate definitions.”
The either/or you offer is not exhaustive.
Nor, I think, have I offered ANY definitions.
I think Mr. Borstlap’s rather useful term simply describes what a sector of the community has voluntarily done to itself/themselves. Which has appeared for the last few years to be an increasing fractionalisation of something that used to be perfectly simple to most of us — back in the good old days when there were males and females, and some preferred to consort with their own rather than the opposite sex.
Civil rights of various sorts led to the identification of the more open LGB community. Those three letters seemed to have it covered, and then when there was protest from a certain quarter, T was added. (Mostly to cover the “rights” of cross-dressers). Still the general public more or less understood the terminology, said “fair enough” and left people to their own devices and preferences.
Recent political trends have led to an ever-increasing alphabet soup of terms that only their coiners understand. And new letters and symbols are added as soon as some “self-identifyer” makes a loud enough case. And the current climate makes it impossible for people of good sense to challenge any of this letterisation of what used to be personal and private matters. But let’s not be in any doubt — the letterisation has come from the letter people themselves, not from anyone else.
For the love of heaven, there were schools in England instructed not to challenge children who came in “identifying as” rabbits during the highest peaks of the “self-identification” hysteria last year.
Mr. Borstlap is also correct in saying identity politics is proto-fascistic. We have seen that all too often in recent years: it’s what cancel culture, no-platforming, etc, are all about. And victimology. All this letterisation just means a new individual or group has thought up a grievance and “self-identified” it, creating yet another classification that is previously unknown to anyone else but it now to be treated as if it were Holy Writ.
I’ll stick to the NATO alphabet.
Ursula Doyle was hounded out of her job for publishing gender critical authors.
We live in an increasingly dark age.
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/07/18/hounded-out-of-her-job-for-publishing-gender-critical-authors/
I’m member of a Personal Assistant Selfhelp Society which supports the rights of the QWERTY people, but up till now for some reason there’s no public attention to our plights whatsoever.
Sally
Oh, so they’re a TYPE, Sally!!
“Civil rights of various sorts led to the identification of the more open LGB community. Those three letters seemed to have it covered, and then when there was protest from a certain quarter, T was added.”
But who added the T?
And why?
A very, very good and possibly important question.
Apparently, the majority of T people are cross-dressers. I have a respect for people who undergo surgery to change their lives because of a real or perceive dysphoria, but as far as I am concerned men who simply want to play at being women through costume and other affectations are merely doing to women what whites do to blacks when they black their faces.
And these people seem to be demanding the use of women’s spaces, some of which are designed to protect them from men. AND their supporters have traduced anyone who questions the notion that saying you are a woman makes you one.
We have already seen rapists assigned to women’s prisons, male attributes intact. And we have seen the campaign to let children and young people, who are often confused about sexuality and whose bodies — and minds –are undergoing many changes, engage in dangerous physical treatment, without medical or parental leave.
The whole thing has got dangerously out of hand, and the sooner the grown-ups step up and remind people that saying a thing is so does not make it so, the sooner we can get back to live and let live.
I don’t care if people are gay or straight, and if they change their sex they probably tick the revised version of M/F on their documentation. I don’t care if people want to cross-dress for fun or even for keeps as long as they do not demand “rights” to which their male tackle does not entitle them. They are playing dress-up — PRETENDING. That does not come with a bill of rights.
But the same sort of bizarre wokery that has turned millions into pro-Palestinians has got people behind the whole T-rights subculture that has caused so much trouble. One begins to think there is some malign force pulling the strings in the background to all this. But then one remembers the fall of the Roman empire…maybe we, or at least some of us, have done it to ourselves.
Queers for Palestine. Chickens for KFC.
Lima Golf Bravo Tango Quebec India.
Look mummy; no hands!!
It’s a book written by an academic for academics.
Nobody is asking you to read it, yet you feel the need to take a dump on it (without having read it yourself).
As for the price, it”s an 800-page short-run hardcover.
Absolutely. Snide posts like this simply show a complete misunderstanding of academic research and publishing.
Especially disheartening coming from a blog which constantly bemoans the underfunding of the arts while being incapable of seeing how it is inextricably tied to this kind of anti-academic discourse.
Nonsense, that depends upon the subject.
The idea of creating a music therapy specially for ‘queer and trans’ people suggests that being ‘queer’ or ‘trans’ would demand a different type of music therapy than the usual one. This implies that music is somehow related to such labelling, making music literal, while the fundamental quality of music is its transcendental nature. It is this transcendental nature of music which is the core of any music therapy. In short: what works for a binary patient will work for any letter-doomed patient as well. The whole starting point of the idea is easily seen through and such thing can only bubble-up in the heads of a certain type of academics without a real understanding of music, let alone of music therapy. It is comparable with something like ‘The Roman Catholic way of Breeding Rabbits’, combining two things that have nothing to do with each other. And don’t forget that academia is quite good at inventing new ways of inquiry to keep the profession going.
Good grief. What a load of old cobblers.
If this means conversion therapy then I’m all for it. The word “queer” by definition means something off and not quite right that calls for medical/ psychiatric therapy.
Must be easy for you to issue proclamations like that, about other people’s lives. Perhaps you could try to develop just a bit of analytical sublety and finesse, not to mention knowledge of history.
https://www.cjr.org/language_corner/queer.php
https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/queer-history-a-history-of-queer/
Your constant need to comment on posts of this nature suggests an unhealthy obsession that might require some seeing to.
What a disgusting comment.
Yes very disgusting to expose our young children and christian families to this LBGTQ+xyz charade.
Yes all those concerned christian moms always ready to be offended.
In my teens, I found this very therapeutic:
https://www.discogs.com/release/1005780-Stockhausen-Trans
You find that SOOTHING? Get help!
I was liberated from my insomnia two years ago by listening to this every evening:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34_SfP7ZCXA
Sally
If I remember well, Stockhausen referred to another kind of “Trans” i.e. the transition from life to death. In other words, “Trans” is a bizarre soundtrack for the dying.
Perhaps if the topic doesn’t interest you the best bet is to just not buy.
I don’t think that advice is necessary Willym. A bit like the book!
It’s basically a music textbook. I doubt anyone outside of academia will pick up a copy, much like any other music textbook which basically goes obsolete after a few years.
And we thought the progressives in academia were out of touch?
Who is not fascinated by the burning issue “what does it mean to think of a military drone pilot as “unmanned”?
Worth every cent of public money.
Sounds like they need to read Dr. James Lindsay’s co-authored ‘academic paper’, “The Penis as a Social Construct”!!! Bloody hilarious spoof.
What a shameless pile of sh**. Anyone who can take this kind of asinine, fashionable fantasy writing seriously should have their head examined, period.