Queerness, sounded: autoethnographic aurality

ABSTRACT

Grounded in queer/quare autoethnography, this essay examines the value of sound that points to the social, the cultural, the political, and the historical through the subjectivities of the coauthors. By foregrounding each author’s sensory experiences of queerness, this essay highlights the ways that meanings of nonverbal communication are always already grounded in cultural contexts. In so doing, the overall goal of this essay is to disrupt communication research on the politics of identity that often privileges the written word over other sensory experiences.

KEYWORDS:

• storytelling
• queer
• quare
• sound
• whiteness

Acknowledgements

The authors would sincerely like to thank the themed issue editor, Robin M. Boylorn, and the intelligent, amazing, and kind anonymous peer reviewers for their careful and in-depth evaluations of this essay. Special thanks to Sohinee Roy for the final editing.

Notes

1 Robin M. Boylorn and Tony E. Adams, “Queer and Quare Autoethnography,” in Qualitative Inquiry through a Critical Lens, ed. Norman K. Denzin and Michale D. Giardina (London: Routledge, 2016), 88.

2 Boylorn and Adams, “Queer and Quare Autoethnography.”

3 See, for example, José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009); Joshua Chambers-Letson, After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (New York: New York University Press, 2018); Kara Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures (New York: New York University Press, 2019).

4 Shinsuke Eguchi and Godfried Asante, “Disidentifications Revisited: Queer(y)ing Intercultural Communication Theory,” Communication Theory 26, no. 2 (2016): 171–89.

5 Ibid.; Boylorn and Adams, “Queer and Quare Autoethnography.”

6 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia; Chambers-Letson, After the Party; Keeling, Queer Times.

7 Tony E. Adams and Stacy Holman Jones, “Autoethnography Is Queer,” in Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies, ed. Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2008), 378.

8 Boylorn and Adams, “Queer and Quare Autoethnography”; Eguchi and Asante, “Disidentifications Revisited.”

9 E. Patrick Johnson, “‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother,” Text and Performance Quarterly 21, no. 1 (2001): 3.

10 Eguchi and Asante, “Disidentifications Revisited.”

11 See E. Patrick Johnson, ed., No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

12 Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: New York University Press, 2016).

13 Anjuli Joshi Brekke, “The Sound of Yellow Rain: Resisting Podcasting’s Sonic Whiteness,” in Radio’s Second Century: Past, Present, and Future Perspectives, ed. John Allen Hendricks (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020), 173–90.

14 Stoever, The Sonic Color Line, 11.

15 Ibid.

16 Nicole Seymour, “The Queerness of Environmental Affect,” in Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), 235.

17 Bryant Keith Alexander, The Performative Sustainability of Race: Reflections on Black Culture and the Politics of Identity (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), 141.

18 Adams and Jones, “Autoethnography Is Queer,” 375 original emphasis.

19 Patrick Santoro, “Queerscape: Embodying Landscape and Rupture in Auto/Ethnography,” International Review of Qualitative Research 9, no. 1 (2016): 107–36.

20 Sachi Sekimoto and Christopher Brown, “A Phenomenology of the Racialized Tongue: Embodiment, Language, and the Bodies that Speak,” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 5, no. 2 (2016): 101–22.

21 Jacques Khalip, “‘The Archaeology of Sound’: Derek Jarman’s Blue and Queer Audiovisuality in the Time of AIDS,” differences 21, no. 2 (2010): 73–108.

22 Sara Ahmed, “Queer Feelings,” in The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, ed. Donald E. Hall and Annamarie Jagose (London: Routledge, 2012), 422–41.

23 Ahmed, “Queer Feelings,” 425.

24 Santoro, “Queerscape.”

25 Ibid.

26 See Brekke, “The Sound of Yellow Rain.”

27 José Esteban Muñoz, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 31, no. 3 (2006): 676.

28 Ibid., 682.

29 Ahmed, “Queer Feelings,” 424.

30 Thomas K. Nakayama, “Show/Down Time: ‘Race,’ Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Culture,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 11, no. 2 (1994): 162–79.

31 Dwight Conquergood, “Rethinking Ethnography: Towards a Critical Cultural Politics,” Communications Monographs 58, no. 2 (1991): 179–94.

32 Ibid., 183.

33 Conquergood, “Rethinking Ethnography.”