Suchergebnisse

This interdisciplinary text examines the lack of transgender inclusion in Western classical music, especially through the lens of opera. By looking at the dearth of transgender characters, singers, and composers, as well as the author's personal experiences as a transgender singer in classical spaces, this project develops a strong position on ways that Western classical music should work to incorporate transgender voices, both literally and figuratively. Some of these methods are modeled in this thesis, such as consultations with other transgender artists, transgeneric devising, and trans-centric composing. The author worked with local transgender singers to understand their views on opera, and from those sessions composed three arias for transgender voices, which are presented here. These arias are embedded self-reflexively in a performative document that embraces several different writing contexts, such as epic poetry, diaries, Socratic dialogues, legislation, and course writing.

This autoethnography traces Susan Stryker's articulation of transgender rage through the monstrous cyborg figure of the catfish (people who pretend to be someone else online), examining the passing politics of the Turing Test and its trans foundations. The author's disidentification with catfish characters in Glee, Pretty Little Liars, and Gossip Girl allows these characters to transmit and produce transgender rage, illustrating the strengths and weaknesses of taking a disidentificatory approach to transphobic texts.

In 2014, two contestants on Big Brother (CBS), Frankie Grande and Zach Rance, began a showmance (ship name: Zankie). The presence of two men in a showmance, only one of whom was openly queer before filming, created ample conversation among fans and contestants about Rance's sexual orientation, as he seemed to be undergoing a personal bi-awakening narrative on live TV. The rhetorics of reality TV paint this both as a sincere struggle and as a joking game strategy, which occasions an overdetermined scrutiny of whether Rance is really bisexual or if he is queerbaiting the audience. Rance's performance of self on the show relies on queerbaiting, but he also deploys rhetoric surrounding bisexuality that allows him to participate in a same-sex showmance while still claiming heterosexuality outside the context of the show. His contradictory articulations of identity and desire reinforce stereotypes about bisexuals while also calling into question the heteronormative assumptions behind the showmance label.