The Music of Feminist Disability Studies?

[pheloniusfriar]

I have finished my first new piece of music in three years (I think). 60 hours of academic research, sound palette development, sleepless nights, and composition later, I unveil to the world, what is likely the first piece of feminist disabilities studies music ever, in a piece that I have entitled "Sitpoint Epistemology". I originally had this up on MySpace (remember MySpace? heh...), but I have it up on my own server now:

Sitpoint Epistemology

If you listen to it, please let me know your impressions (I have a thick skin, fyi, and really am trying to grow and learn musically and feedback is so important).

This piece of music was my term project for a 2nd year Feminist Disabilities Studies course at Carleton University this summer. We were given the choice between doing a research paper or a creative project (with a shorter paper describing the work). The project had to integrate the themes covered in the course or explore one or more deeply. I chose to explore interdependency and the standpoint epistemological nature of disability (that knowledge is personal and is shaped by one's place/role in society, and which has been given the neologism "sitpoint epistemology" in recognition that non-able-bodied individuals also have their own valid and unique experiences/frames of reference). As I told the class, I deliberately avoided the "social model" of disability (that disability is simply imposed by society on individuals with impairments) and focused on the personal as a way of also critiquing the dominant value judgements imposed on us all by our dysfunctional society.

This course is probably one of the hardest things I've ever had to wrap my head around in my life. It's the closest thing I've ever seen to an answer to "define the universe, give three examples". There was so much covered and pretty much all of what we call culture or society came under various microscopes and then was torn apart using the tools of post-modernist thought. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that this course has probably changed the rest of my life (and is likely going to be remembered as having had the greatest impact on me of any of the courses I take in my undergrad studies).

When I embarked upon this project, I wanted to delve into an area that I had heard very little about: the idea of music as a means of exploring the experience of disability, and of the specific themes of feminist disability study that we covered in the course. From my own experiences, music is a unique means to bring manifest the embodiment of disability in a way that no conversation or text is able. Conduct even the most cursory examination of classical, film, or popular music and as Lerner and Straus state in their groundbreaking collection of essays, "once one starts to think about music through the lens of disability, disability suddenly appears everywhere". The field is too broad to explore as introduction here, but consider Björk's score for the film "Dancer in the Dark", a film that, on the surface, reflects the sociohistorical formula that the physically disabled and emotionally disfigured must be removed from able-bodied society. As Iverson wrote in her essay "Dancing out of the Dark": "As the film places Selma at the center of the narrative, the soundtrack asks us to identify with her. The aural realm is the space where we fully experience the world from Selma's perspective. Though we cannot see through her eyes, we nevertheless hear through her ears. The soundtrack defines, as it were, how Selma's blindness sounds [...] Through the soundtrack, the audience learns how Selma copes as a blind woman in a society that is unwilling to accommodate her". Consider the pianist Glenn Gould himself, the physical degeneration of Beethoven and Bach, the deliberate exploration of disability by Shostakovich and Shoenberg, or look to Kate Bush's masterpiece of psychotic dysfunction "Get Out of My House" or her whimsical exploration of ADHD in "Sat In Your Lap", and I challenge anyone not to be moved by Sinéad O'Connor's rendition of Phil Coulter's "Scorn Not His Simplicity" that he wrote about his son born with Down's Syndrome.

When I began this project, it was with an intuitive belief, from my own experiences, that since there was so much music informed by disability, that there would be a large body of academic work that I would be able to draw upon and integrate to realize my particular composition goals. Instead, what I learned is that purportedly the first paper on the subject was presented at a conference in 2004 and the first academic collection of essays, "Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music", was published in 2006, and beyond that there are only a few isolated works that have tried to tackle this difficult subject. This situation continually brought to mind the old saying "writing about music is like dancing about architecture"... Well writing about disability in music with academic rigour compounds the seeming intractibility of the task. As Rosemarie Garland-Thomson wrote in her foreword to that essay collection: "I have always secretly doubted that disability could be represented in musical form"; however, she does retract her doubts shortly thereafter, and a good thing too for me.

In composing this piece, I turned to two forms that have been called the yin and yang, the male and female of each other: industrial and goth music. Both are what I have increasingly come to believe are inherently music of disability, a post-modernist voice for that which cannot be spoken. Both express the disability imposed upon the individual who, for whatever reason — be it physical, mental, emotional, or social impairment — find themselves outside the normalized expressions imposed by society. My composition is deliberately narrative for clarity and explores the comforting dissonance of hope and birth and then builds the trope of the able-bodied family. This construct quickly falls apart with onset of sudden and catastrophic disability, specifically, as I have envisioned it for comparative purposes: the disability of fraternal twins, one male and one female. The musical theme of gender plays itself out over and over as the melodic elements draw the strands together... the mother, the able-bodied sister, even the disabled twin out of necessity when things don't work out. The trope of employment is also explored, but is ultimately shown to be futile and meaningless. A means to justify a means. In the end, the lives of my subjects go nowhere and end with a whimper, leaving little trace of their passage; however, this is not simply a commentary about the disabled in our society, it is a statement on the overall failure of our disassociated and dysfunctional culture where this is the fate of almost all who pass through it, but is a phenomenon amplified by the disabled. I deliberately avoid the use of the "social model" to explore the unfolding nature of the events and instead try to convey the interdependent personal experiences of the siblings, and so I called this piece "Sitpoint Epistemology".