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<p>This dissertation contends that sound and aurality ought to be more fully integrated
into how gender and sexuality are thought. The dissertation’s title, “Partial Figures,”
refers to its aims: not to exhaustively document the status of sound within discourses
of sexual difference and dissidence, but rather to sketch how queer and feminist thought
might draw on sound’s resources. The project is thus situated within the longer trajectory
of visual approaches to power and gender. “Partial Figures” also describes what I
suggest are sound and aurality’s specific erosion of the figure as a presumptive requirement
of approaches to social life and aesthetic form. By partial, I mean both incomplete
and nonunitary, subject to the decay and growth, the putative disfigurement, that
Hortense Spillers describes under the rubric of flesh. Finally, the notion of being
partial, as opposed to impartial, is also at play. Partiality -- having a weakness
for something – describes an orientation that bridges affection and dependency or
debility; it compromises aesthetics as a site for the exercise of judgement. To be
partial to something or someone is to be rendered incomplete by that thing, a torsion
or disfigurement that marks queer and feminist method. By considering notions of
musical flavor and corporeality (Chapter 1), queer sound ecologies (Chapter 2), and
gendered ontologies of frequency and vibration (Chapter 3), I revisit key conceptual
knots within theories of gender and sexuality that require a more sustained attention
to sound and aurality. </p><p> </p><p>I focus on two fundamental preoccupations within
queer and feminist scholarship that, I argue, are reconfigured by the methodological,
material, and historical resources of sound: corporeality (Chapter 1) and ecology
(Chapter 2). From this assessment of sound’s essential resources for theories of gender
and sexuality, Chapter 3 then moves, through a consideration of sexual difference
as noise, to suggest that sonic ontologies likewise cannot properly be thought without
queer and feminist method. </p><p>The first chapter concerns corporeality as a principal
site of feminist theory’s turn to questions of matter and affect in the 2000s. For
some influential theorists, I argue, an ambiguous and overdetermined relationship
between food, fatness, and “epidemic” debility became a cipher for the specifically
causative or agential powers of matter and affect. I show, however, that these powers
have already been thought otherwise in the overlapping contexts of black studies and
musicology. I take up notions of musical flavor and culinary sound in the work of
Fred Moten and Theodor Adorno, respectively, alongside Hortense Spillers’ account
of ungendered flesh as resisting figuration in the sense of both embodiment and (ac)counting.
Like fatness, musical flavor is felt as the distension and elaboration of form and
enjoyment, its aesthetic and figural enrichments taken for a failure to budget and
apportion pleasure, need, and dependency. Within feminism’s turn toward corporeal
matter, I argue, fatness and food have been made to serve as both a hinge and an impasse.
On the one hand, the purported links between eating, fatness, and debility have been
taken as the very image of self-evident causation. On the other hand, however, fatness
troubles etiology, generating endless (and to date, inconclusive) speculation about
what causes it and how its alleged social pathology might be reversed. Its status
as a site of commingled growth and purported decay, life and “premature” death or
debility, has presented itself to some writers as an apparent conundrum. In addition
to Moten, Adorno, and Spillers, I draw on critiques of causality by Denise Ferreira
da Silva and Michel Foucault. The nonopposition of growth and decay, life and debility,
enjoyment and dependency, emerges through music and artworks by Future, UGK, Anicka
Yi, Alvin Lucier, and Constantina Zavitsanos, among others.</p><p>Chapter 2 concerns
a second historically vexed site for thinking gender and sexuality: nature and ecology.
I approach the relation between sex, ecology, and sound through one of queer theory’s
founding preoccupations: “public,” outdoor, or undomestic sexual gathering. “Public
sex” has been imagined as a question of sightlines and their obstruction, but I argue
that its sociality is given form by acoustics and acute sensitivity to environmental
sound in spaces where visual obscurity offers both protection and danger. I read
the 1998 album Second nature: an electro-acoustic pastoral, produced from field recordings
of a parkland cruising ground by the group Ultra-red, who develop an audio ecology
of this queer sexual commons alongside a critique of the pastoral as a site of musical
and ecological containment. Works by Samuel Delany, Simon Leung, June Jordan, Park
McArthur, Lorraine O’Grady, TLC, and others situate Ultra-red’s Second nature within
an understanding of a sexual commons that views need and dependency as forms of ecological
wealth. </p><p>Chapter 3 considers noise as a figure for feminine sexual difference,
suggesting that ontologies of sound must be conditioned by queer and feminist thought.
My argument proceeds through an account of chatter, frequency, and perpetual motion,
considering Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” chatbots, gifs, David Lynch’s 2006 film Inland
Empire, consciousness-raising, and the work of artists Jessica Vaughn, Amber Hawk
Swanson, and Pauline Oliveros. Questions of frequency and vibration have emerged as
part of sonic ontologies in recent years; I trace the entry of vibration and “vibes”
into U.S. popular discourse in the early 20th century through the theological and
musicological writing of Sufi Inayat Khan. Among his areas of influence, I focus on
the history of modern dance, particularly its Orientalist preoccupation with the animated
wave-forms of loose fabric, which was demonstrably molded by Khan’s theories of vibration.
This racially and sexually marked “signature” gesture was the subject of several intellectual
property lawsuits that sustained legal ambiguity about the status of performance as
property.</p>
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