- Sophie Abramowitz "A Sweet, Separate Intimacy: Female Folk Collectors of the Harlem Renaissance"
- Amanda Martinez "Going Out at Home: Privatized Vice and the Consumption of Racial Otherness in Postwar Suburban Music Listening"
- Joseph M. Thompson "Foreign Love: U.S. Soldiers, Country Music, and the Gender Politics of Transnational Sexual Encounters"
Moderator: Michaelangelo MatosOne of the sustaining threads of popular music history is a preoccupation with interracial romance and sexual encounters. From the nineteenth century standard “The Yellow Rose of Texas” to the Western Swing of Cindy Walker’s “Cherokee Maiden” to the Orientalist fantasy of David Bowie’s “China Girl,” the allure of love, or at least sex, across different iterations of the color line in different eras has endured for songwriters and audiences. Whether symbolic and lyrical or literal--Elvis crossing the tracks to the black gospel church, Zora Neale Hurston putting Alan Lomax in blackface to move safely past police in the Jim Crow South--fraught spatial transgression is recurrent throughout American music. But what are the consequences for those who participate in this transgression of racial barriers? How and why does gender shape who gets to cross these lines? How does gender reinforce racial privilege for white listeners in search of interracial relationships? Focusing on the experience of listening in different spaces, this panel considers how notions of race and gender combine to form a mechanism of power for the consumption of racial others. Considering both to be fluid identity categories whose meanings are always contingent, our panel charts the movement of sonic exotica as it’s collected and received by white men and women. Rather than taking listening to be an unmediated physical act, we attend specifically to the ways that crossing from one physical space into another--whether demarcated by a national border, a township boundary, or a suburban doorway--affects the racial and gender constructions of the performers and listeners, sometimes each in the ears of the other. By considering the fetishization of women of color in suburban homes and zones of military occupation, along with the faux-transparency of white female song collectors’ movements and transcriptions of black and indigenous folksong, our panel traces the power and limitations of gender to challenge racial hierarchies and conversely posits new ways to understand how women assemble themselves in song.
