In contemporary Canada, Great Britain, and Ireland, emergent divisions define the political and social landscapes of sexualities and gender. This presentation reflects on experimental music workshops as part of Beyond Opposition, a research project that explores opposition around gender, sexuality, and abortion in everyday spaces in ‘post-equality’ contexts. We reflect on the process of creating and delivering a workshop in Vancouver, Canada, where participants with opposing views in relation to gender, sexuality and abortion collaborate through music. In the workshop, participants consider how music and sound allow for new ways of thinking about how they relate to others with whom they disagree on gender and sexuality; participants also engage music to collectively imagine new worlds, including what it might look like to live together in everyday spaces when they do not agree. The workshop bridges the fields of cultural geography and music, bringing together people with a range of different positions on gender, abortion, and sexuality to consider everyday geographies of gender and sexuality through music and sound. The musician (Gillian Stone) and researchers (Katie Young and Kath Browne) will reflect on the role that music played in participants’ collective imagining of living with difference in relation to gender and sexuality in everyday spaces. In particular we focus on what musical practice and process for non-musician participants might enable in imagining living together differently when we do not and cannot occupy the same positionalities in relation to sexualities, genders and abortion.

Presenter: Katie Young / Co-Authors: Gillian Stone and Kath Browne
Brock University / University College Dublin

---

 
ID Abstract: 733