YOU AND ME: Performing and Queering Whiteness
This presentation presents excerpts from our recent video essay, “YOU and ME – Where and How do we Meet”, framed by a performative presentation and interaction with audience. The research focused on the intersectional materiality of the voice within the larger theoretical context of aurality studies. Particularly: our voices as white performers and academics. We look to unpack the relationship between a writer’s positionality and their material – specifically how whiteness ‘works’ in different formats of documentation. Acknowledging the normalized whiteness of academic writing as a format, and music theory as a “white male” foundational reference point when working with sonic arts (Neely 2020). Our research examines how the video format: 1. exposes and implicates the researcher’s own embodied positionality, 2. allows for a wider range of language and non-languauge use, which might communicate the material more effectively, and has the potential to reach a larger audience and 3. complexifies the theoretical aspect of the work by the very fact of embodying the messiness of the space between ‘clean’ theory and embodied action (Spatz 2021, Campbell and Farrier 2015). This format offers a way to, as Donna Harraway writes, ‘stay with the trouble’.