Jodie Louise Taylor

The intimate insider: negotiating the ethics of friendship when doing insider research

Favoured by ethnographers with some degree of closeness to the culture they wish to examine, the cultural participant as insider researcher has become relatively commonplace across the humanities. A large body of methodological literature now exists on this, highlighting the advantages and some of the dilemmas of conducting insider research. This literature is not exhaustive, as there remain elements of insider research still underdeveloped, such as how one goes about negotiating previously established friendships and intimate relationships in this context. Indeed, what are the benefits and dilemmas engendered by such negotiations? Drawing on existing scholarly accounts of field-based friendship and the author’s experiences of researching queer culture as an insider, this article addresses these questions in relation to the author’s field of inquiry and to social research paradigms more broadly. Subsequently, it argues that while being intimately inside one’s field does offer significant advantages, it also reshapes the researcher’s role in and experiences of her own culture and those within it.

Queer temporalities and the significance of 'music scene' participation in the social identities of middle-aged queers.

During the last decade in particular, the scope of queer scholarship has expanded. Queer readings, theories and problematics now pervade multiple sites of cultural and sociological thinking, reaching beyond the specificities of gender and sexuality and their attendant politics. While there is still impor tant work to be done in these areas, thinking beyond the sexual act allows for an understanding of ‘queer’ through culture and as lifestyle. Here, I relate this specifically to music scene participation and middle age by exploring the significance of music and dance-based activities in the lives of queer people who do not perform their age in accordance with heteronormative conventions of social propriety and thus do not conform to desirable heteronormative temporalities. The concept of ‘queer temporality’ is not new, however this article demonstrates the relationship of musical time to this temporal scheme thus offering an additional perspective on queer time.

Popular music and the aesthetics of ageing

The cultural turn in sociology and related fields of study has brought with it new understandings of the various ways social identities are formed. In a post-structural landscape, social identities must increasingly be regarded as reflexively derived ‘performative assemblages’ that incorporate elements of the local vernacular and global popular cultures. Building on the above reinterpretation of social identity, this paper takes as its central premise the notion that, in addition to its well-mapped cultural importance for youth, popular music retains a critical currency for the ageing audience as a key cultural resource of post-youth identification, lifestyle and associated cultural practices. In its examination of the relationship between popular music, ageing and identity, this paper uses illustrative examples drawn from ethnographic data collected by the authors between 2002 and 2009 in Australia and the UK.

The queerest of the queer: Sexuality, politics and music on the Brisbane scene

Brisbanes queer scene is relatively obscure; outside those who actively participate in it, little is known of it and practically nothing is written about it. Broadly speaking, queer culture works in direct contrast to the coherent and commodified culture of the gay mainstream and collectively rejects conventional ‘gay music’, favouring instead a multiplicity of musical styles and performances. This is particularly evident in the local context where queer clubs and events were born to facilitate the musical desires of those dissatisfied with the music spun weekly at mainstream gay venues. The present paper demonstrates how the local queer scenes musical eclecticism corresponds to its multifarious performances of queer sexuality, suggesting that queer musical performances and events produce a musico-sexual synergy that accommodates an array of sexual perversities and musical tastes. The paper looks at both the musical performances and related identity performances that occur in Brisbanes queer club scene and queer social events, focusing particularly on the scenes accommodation of ‘alternative’ musical tastes. Supporting material gathered from interviews with scene participants provides the basis for a critical examination of Brisbanes queer music scene and is placed in the context of contemporary discourse on both queer and musical identities.

Scenes and sexualities: Queerly reframing the music scenes perspective

Historically, research on music cultures has favoured examination of the subcultural affiliations of the youthful urban white working-class heterosexual male. While the prominence of this subject has since been contested by a number of scholars, even the most celebrated forms of scholarship in this area continue to work within heteronormative discourses. In fact, omitted considerations of non-heterosexualities and sexual styles are a stark reminder of the frequent invisibility of the queer subject, not only in relation to much subcultural and post-subcultural theory, but also in relation to broader discussions about musical and extra-musical style generally. This paper addresses these omissions. Specifically, it reviews existing music scenes literature demonstrating how, as a theoretical concept, scene has emerged out of the reductiveness and rigidity of subcultural theory. It examines work on musically mediated performances of sexuality, identifying the need for more work around sexualities and music scenes in everyday contexts. It proposes how and by whom such work can be done. And it details the integration of queer theories into the music scenes perspective, showing how ‘scene’ can accommodate a more flexible approach to queer collective formations which is necessary for everyday musically mediated queer subjectivities to be understood.

Taking it in the ear: On musico-sexual synergies and the (queer) possibility that music is sex

Across ages and cultures, musics relationship to sexual allure and its adept capacity for invoking pleasure, eroticism, and desire are well established. Musics ability to arouse and channel sexual urges and desires renders it both a dynamic mode of gender and sexual signification and a putative agent of moral corruption. Music can convey coded sexual innuendo, give shape to a persons erotic agency, or constitute a significant part of their sexual identity. For some, listening to music may, in fact, be considered an erotically pleasurable or even a sexual act. Drawing selectively on musics erotic history, on queer erotic possibilities, as well as on contemporary accounts of musically-mediated eroticism and identity situated across a broad range of popular genres, this paper will examine the way music can be used to catalyze and negotiate erotic pleasures. Specifically, it will examine this in terms of what the author names as ‘musico-sexual synergies’. These include: music as a stylistic marker of sexual identity; music as a structuring device for sexual action; and the fetishization of music and/or sound – that is, the sexual fetish known as ‘auralism’.

Queerious youth: An empirical study of a queer youth cultural festival and its participants

Various institutional legacies and contemporary social circumstances often work to constrain the voices and cultural expressions of gender and sexually diverse young people. However, gender and sexually diverse youth can also respond critically and creatively, generating their own sites of cultural participation and meaning. Through an empirical case study of Queeriosity – a queer youth cultural festival held in Brisbane, Australia – this article details the impetus behind the creation of this youth-led event. Second, drawing on participant observations and survey data collected at the festival, this article provides a ‘snapshot’ of the various identities, attitudes and cultural styles that circulate within Brisbane’s queer youth communities. Finally, it argues that the spectacle, celebration and diverse articulations of youth sexualities which underpinned Queeriosity provided participants with opportunities for sexual self-making.

Erotic screen and sound: Culture, media, and desire

Sexual desire and the intent to arouse – the erotic – is ubiquitous. Erotic impulses preoccupy our psyches, shape our identities, inscribe our bodies, and mediate our relationships with others and objects. Proliferating into the banal everydayness of contemporary life, we find inscriptions of the erotic in the back corner of our local news agency, online, on stage, screens, airwaves, billboards, supermarket shelves, and on gallery walls. A public, private and often highly politicized concern, few subjects are as simultaneously commonplace and controversial as the erotic. Whatever its form – sacred, profane, ordinary, perverse, vanilla, or kinky – the erotic has persisted in its ability to delight, entertain, panic and outrage us throughout history and across cultures. The collection of articles that comprise this special edition of Continuum has its origins in a conference on ‘Erotic Screen and Sound: Culture, Media and Desire’ convened by Jodie Taylor and David Baker at Griffith University in 2011. The theme of this conference invited submissions on the ways the erotic is represented, aestheticized, encountered, mediated, and embodied in and through historic and contemporary cultural forms and practices. The essays in this collection address, examine, theorize, and historicize the erotic in relation to cinema, television, music, visual arts, cultural performance, and ritual. Opening this edition, Adrian Martin hypothesizes a level of psychic agitation in cinema viewing which constitutes the bedrock upon which any effective erotics might be theorized, preceding what he calls representational, surface levels of cinesexuality. This begins with the almost banal recognition of narrative structure as a kind of tension/release analogous to both male and female sexual excitation. Martin argues for the continuing usefulness of such an open-ended and formless metapsychology of the cinematic apparatus. Attending to the sense of touch, Elizabeth Stephens extends recent work in feminist phenomenological film theory and its emphasis on the visual, to examine cinema as a technology of sensory training. Drawing on historical philosophies of the senses, Stephens argues that cinema cultivates our senses and can thus be understood as a ‘sensation machine’, establishing a cine-somatic loop between screen and subject, the visual and the visceral. Focusing on the audience-centred culture of entertainment, Alan McKee proposes a reading of pornography as a subset of entertainment. He argues that, since the nineteenth

Book review: Being ethnographic: a guide to the theory and practice of ethnography: Raymond Madden: London: SAGE, 2010, 196 pp., pbk

References Freeman, L.C. (2004) The Development of Social Network Analysis: A Study in the Sociology of Science. Vancouver, BC: Empirical Press. Martin, J.L. (1998) ‘Structures of Power in Naturally Occurring Communities’, Social Networks 20: 197–225. Martin, J.L. (2002) ‘Some Algebraic Structures for Diffusion in Social Networks’, Journal of Mathematical Sociology 26: 123–46. Rhodes, R.A.W. (1997) Understanding Governance: Policy Networks, Governance, Reflexivity and Accountability. Buckingham: Open University Press.