A Feminist Ethnomusicology: Writings on Music and Gender

Foreword

Foreword Suzanne Cusick With A Feminist Ethnomusicology, Ellen Koskoff has given us an intellectually eclectic, rigorously self-aware, lucidly written, and sometimes hilarious guide to how the paradoxical interdiscipline of feminist ethnomusicology has developed over the past forty years. Koskoff herself describes the book as a kind of intellectual memoir that shows the process of change in a thoroughly intersectional professional life, but I would argue that it is more like an autoethnography, for it is firmly based in her own participant observation amid the creation of a feminist ethnomusicology from multiple disciplines, conversations, and concerns over a lifetime of “face-to-face talking, laughing, listening, eating, musicking.” To Koskoff, such shared interactions between embodied, constantly changing human beings constitute the essence of fieldwork , which she posits as an ideal method both for ethnomusicology and for feminism—as well as the method for acquiring and developing knowledge that is the “most fun.” There is ample fun in this autoethnography, and not only because Koskoff has peppered some of the essays with sidesplitting anecdotes that present moments of shared, nonverbal recognition of sameness-difference as explosions of laughter. Koskoff’s chronological account of her own path to a feminist ethnomusicology tacks deftly between such anecdotes and brilliantly distilled, utterly reader-friendly exegeses of the political, theoretical, and disciplinary concerns that shaped her own thought and practice, as well as that of her sisters in feminist music scholarship. The result is that complicated, emotionally , and politically fraught encounters between music and anthropology, ethnomusicology and gender studies, historical musicology and ethnomusicology , any and all of those and cultural studies, literary theory, or the several x Foreword “post-” disciplines are made easy to grasp. They seem like the personal and intellectual adventure of one engaged (and highly engaging) person. Once a little girl whose curiosity was piqued by the joy-filled faces of singing men whom she passed on her way to school, and who would later be troubled by a teacher’s instruction to make her whole native state one color on a map, that person would spend her adulthood pondering, in the real and virtual company of others, music, gender, sameness-and-difference, and what it meant to feel both inside and outside a picture that ought rightly to be rich with differences. As a text, A Feminist Ethnomusicology is rich with differences, whether interrogated intellectually, mediated by laughter or music, angrily refused, or respectfully acknowledged. By far the most significant of these is the stark contradiction between feminism’s inherent commitment to political action on behalf of gender equality and ethnomusicology’s equally inherent commitment to the dispassionate understanding of music’s importance in human lives. Although this contradiction seems to have bedeviled Koskoff through many years of fieldwork, it haunts her book very productively: her essays show how she negotiated it by bravely confronting other differences that, in their overlapping, both constituted the contradiction and implied its possible resolutions. Among the most important conflicts fruitfully explored are the conflicting yet overlapping histories, premises, and aims of Western-oriented feminist theory versus mainstream anthropological theory; historical musicology’s emphasis on textwork and elite Western musics versus ethnomusicology’s emphasis on fieldwork and nonelite, non-Western musics; “second-wave” versus “third-wave” feminisms; performance theory versus performativity theory; “genderist” versus “feminist” analysis; knowledge developed from fieldwork versus the desire to create broad, cross-cultural theories of gender’s interaction with musicking; insider versus outsider perspectives; academic versus activist feminisms; Lubavitcher versus nonLubavitcher understandings of the sound of a woman’s voice; cultural studies theory versus anthropological theories of culture; and recent ethnomusicology ’s fascination with global systems of commodified human and cultural circulation versus fieldwork’s emphasis on “everyday, sometimes tedious, sometimes miraculous human interactions,” with their “gendered lessons of compassion, respect for the individual and for the process of life.” Koskoff works through these differences from a position of being “in between ” discourses—a condition she learned to theorize as characterizing both women and music by a combination of textwork with anthropologist Sherry Ortner’s writing and fieldwork among Lubavitcher Jews, for whom music is “the language of the heart,” mediating between the corrupt and the pure, Foreword xi the earthly and the divine, the inside and the outside. In the end, she affirms feminism and ethnomusicology as always having shared certain qualities that she valued—a commitment to social justice, to understanding others, and to the struggle for...