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Prerequisites: there are no prerequisites for this course.

This seminar explores relationships between gender, music and performance from the perspective of ethnomusicology, cultural anthropology, critical music studies, feminist and queer theory and performance studies. We examine debates around issues of sex and gender and nature and culture through the lens of musical performance and experience. Some questions we consider include: In what ways is participation in particular music dictated by gendered conventions? What social purpose do these delineations serve? What might music tell us about the body? What is the relationship between performance and the ways in which masculinity and feminity, homosexuality and heterosexuality are shaped? How can we think about the concept of nation via gender and music? How might the gendered performances and the voices of musical celebrities come to represent or officially "speak" for the nation or particular publics? How does music shape our understanding of emotion, our experience of pleasure?