240076 SE Gender Perspectives on Sound Art (2020W)

The course provides an interdisciplinary overview of the changing relations between sound-based creative practices and gender, sexuality, class, race and ethnicity in the contemporary era. During the course, we will examine contemporary sound art practices as sites of production, negotiation and contestation of discourses associated with gender, sexuality, class, race and ethnicity. The following questions will remain fundamental: how does sound art become a gendered field of artistic practice? How does gender sound and how does sound become a gendered subject? How can sound be political, socially engaged and emancipatory? How it can be feminist, queer, anti-racist, or Afrofuturist? What role do gender discourses play in the musical and technical competence of sound artists? How can gender be represented in acoustic parameters and timbral qualities of sound, that is, how social relations are embedded in the aesthetics of sound art? And finally, how can sound art practices can further problematise and destabilize the binary categories of gender? The above questions will constitute a point of departure for further discussions, theorizations and re-assessments of gender-related matters in the present-day and past sound art practices.

Throughout the course, we will survey scholarly and non-scholarly articles, including such fields as of feminist and queer theory, critical theory, media theory, art history, musicology, and media studies. We will look critically at different artistic practices employing diverse theoretical perspectives and engaging into debates that address gendered readings of sound art and technology (art works, artists’ statements, exhibition catalogues, publicly available archives, online media). At the same time, will examine gendered roles, modes and agencies related to the extended field of sound art practices and technologies, including gendered debates related to listening and display strategies, involving constructions of gaze and spectatorship respectively, including the processes and inequalities resulting from canon formation. On top of that, we will touch upon issues related to identity politics, self- definition, inclusivity and diversity in various social and artistic contexts. The course will end by discussing the most recent and compelling debates on gender balance, incorporating 'otherness' and diverse identity construction strategies in the field of sound art.