Transaurality: On Listening to SOPHIE Against Queer Theory

Anton Blackburn is a Ph.D. Candidate in Ethnomusicology with a Certificate in Feminist Studies. Their dissertation, Incongruous Sound: Trans Music, Nightlife, and Listening in Contemporary London, develops a philosophical ethnography of trans night/life in East London, asking how trans women sustain political and social life through musical and sonic encounters with alienation and suspension. Their fieldwork traces “aural incongruence“ — attending in particular to the voice in transition — as it coheres within constellations of recorded popular music, dance, and listening in postcolonial Britain. Incongruous sounds of (non-)passing make audible the relationship between trans embodiment and harmonic ideologies of the social and the self, where the latter’s entanglement with what María Lugones calls the modern colonial gender system produces a negational “reality reinforcement“ of the former. 

Anton’s writing appears in The Journal of the Royal Musical Association and Contemporary Music Review. They serve as an Associate Editor for Rising Voices in Ethnomusicology and have presented at the American Anthropological Association, the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, and the Duke-Leuphana Gender, Queer, and Transgender Studies Workshop. 

Before Duke, Anton completed an M.St. in Musicology at Oxford University under the supervision of Georgina Born, and holds a B.A. in Music (summa cum laude) also from Oxford.