About this Event
Join us online for Yun Emily Wang's talk, "Listening Incommensurably: Sounding “out” as homonationalist double-bind in Toronto’s Queer Taiwanese Diaspora"
This VIRTUAL ONLY event is available free to Pitt students, faculty, and staff via ZOOM meeting and to the public via livestream on the Music at Pitt YouTube channel.
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Abstract: In this paper I analyze two ethnographic moments of sounding “out” among a group of queer Taiwanese immigrants in Toronto by tracking the incommensurables in each instance.
The first case study took place in a private home in 2014, when my interlocutors exchanged stories of navigating racism in North American queer culture and the ways in which Taiwan’s pending legalization of same-sex marriage produced polarizing family dynamics stretching across the Pacific Ocean. This discussion of intersectional politics was soundtracked by an electronic dance music track consisting of an auto-tuned anti-queer Christian sermon that had gone viral in Taiwan a few months prior, and my interlocutors interacted with the track as non-verbal commentaries that complemented the discussion. The second followed Taiwanese Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling in 2017, when my interlocutors marched in Toronto’s annual Pride Parade. They broadcasted Mandopop queer club anthems with amplifiers on a small hand truck and invited parade bystanders to “party along” and celebrate Taiwan, drowning out the other queer Asian groups. In such politically charged moments of collective listening, singing along, and dancing, my interlocutors engaged with multiple sonic publics that participated in what Jasbir K. Puar calls “homonationalism-as-assemblage” (2015), the processes through which nation states claim sovereignty through queer-friendliness at the expense of the racially and economically marginalized.
Investigating the incommensurabilities between Canadian and Taiwanese queer politics, between sounding and listening, between openness toward an emergent Asian Canadian queer futurity and its own foreclosures, ultimately, I demonstrate the necessity of failures and complicity in efforts toward an otherwise world.
Yun Emily Wang is Assistant Professor of Music and Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies at Duke University. Working at the nexus of sound studies, Asian American and diaspora studies, and intersectional queer and feminist thought, Emily is broadly interested in how the politics of difference orient people’s experience of sound. Her current book project is an ethnography of everyday sounding and listening practices among Chinese-speaking immigrants interfacing the cunning of Canadian multiculturalism. With case studies on queer diaspora, aging in a geriatric care facility, and the gendered geography of intimacy, this book ultimately argues for the political potentials of strategic mishearing in minoritarian life.
Emily’s work has been recognized by multiple prizes at the Society for Ethnomusicology and the Society for Queer Asian Studies. Her Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the University of Toronto was supported by grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council and the Government of Ontario, among others. She was previously a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Music at Columbia University.
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