•  23
    The Gender Politics of Music and the Ineffable: On the Feminine in Jankelevitch and Levinas
    Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology 5 (2): 99-118. 2018.
    ABSTRACTTranslated into English in 2004, Vladimir Jankelevitch’s book Music and the Ineffable has made a significant impact in anglophone musicology. I argue that the figure of the feminine is central to his understanding of music and musical ineffability, and use feminist philosophers’ interpretations and critiques of the figure of the feminine in his close friend and colleague Emmanuel Levinas’s work to unpack the gender politics of Jankelevitch’s book and the secondary literature on it. I foc…Read more
  •  13
    On Popular Music in Postcolonial Theory
    African Philosophy 8 (2): 171-187. 2005.
  •  6
    Neoliberalism co-opts noisy riots like feminism and hardcore music--can melancholic siren songs fight back?
  •  21
    Ewa Płonowska Ziarek. Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism (review)
    philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 4 (2): 244-249. 2014.
  •  11
    I argue that sound-centric scholarship can be of use to feminist theorists if and only if it begins from a non-ideal theory of sound; this article develops such a theory. To do this, I first develop more fully my claim that perceptual coding was a good metaphor for the ways that neoliberal market logics (re)produce relations of domination and subordination, such as white supremacist patriarchy. Because it was developed to facilitate the enclosure of the audio bandwidth, perceptual coding is espe…Read more
  •  10
    Gayraud Agnès, Diaectic of Pop, Urbanomic/Mono Series (MIT Press, 2020), 456 pp., $29.95 (review)
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 79 (1): 120-124. 2021.
  •  26
    Diaectic of Pop
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. forthcoming.
  •  10
    Affective Resonance: On the Uses and Abuses of Music In and For Philosophy
    Phaenex: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture 7 (2). 2012.
    Because music communicates extra-propositionally, philosophers often use musical concepts and metaphors to discuss implicit and/or affective knowledges. Music is a productive means to philosophically analyze affect, but only when these analyses are grounded in rigorous studies of actual musical works and practices. When we don’t ground our study of music in musical practices, works, and theories, “music” just becomes a mirror of whatever assumptions and biases we already have. I show how the ove…Read more
  •  38
    Traditionally, in Anglo-American and Continental philosophy, music is addressed as the object of philosophical analysis: it is either a case study for developing broader, generalizable ideas about ontology, metaphysics, or ethics, or it is the thing that we apply philosophical methods and concepts to.1 It is the philosophy of music, remember. But in the last several decades philosophers in these traditions have increasingly taken “music” as a model for philosophical analysis: There is a branch o…Read more
  •  100
    On popular music in postcolonial theory
    Philosophia Africana 8 (2): 171-187. 2005.
  •  2171
    While feminist aestheticians have long interrogated gendered, raced, and classed hierarchies in the arts, feminist philosophers still don’t talk much about popular music. Even though Angela Davis and bell hooks have seriously engaged popular music, they are often situated on the margins of philosophy. It is my contention that feminist aesthetics has a lot to offer to the study of popular music, and the case of popular music points feminist aesthetics to some of its own limitations and unasked qu…Read more
  •  1060
  •  1190
    Race and the Feminized Popular in Nietzsche and Beyond
    Hypatia 28 (4): 749-766. 2013.
    I distinguish between the nineteenth- to twentieth-century (modernist) tendency to rehabilitate (white) femininity from the abject popular, and the twentieth- to twenty-first-century (postmodernist) tendency to rehabilitate the popular from abject white femininity. Careful attention to the role of nineteenth-century racial politics in Nietzsche's Gay Science shows that his work uses racial nonwhiteness to counter the supposedly deleterious effects of (white) femininity (passivity, conformity, an…Read more
  •  41
    In this paper, I argue that it is productive to read Rancière’s theory of political practice – what he calls “disagreement” – with and against Kodwo Eshun’s theorization of hip hop. Thinking disagreement through hip hop helps flesh out how, exactly, disagreement works, particularly at the level of individual embodiment and consciousness. While Rancière himself gives us many examples of interruptions to the political body , I am interested in examining how these interruptions work in, on, and thr…Read more
  •  136
    Because music communicates extra-propositionally, philosophers often use musical concepts and metaphors to discuss implicit and/or affective knowledges. Music is a productive means to philosophically analyze affect, but only when these analyses are grounded in rigorous studies of actual musical works and practices. When we don’t ground our study of music in musical practices, works, and theories, “music” just becomes a mirror of whatever assumptions and biases we already have. I show how the ove…Read more
  •  2880
    Neoliberal Noise: Attali, Foucault, & the Biopolitics of Uncool
    Culture, Theory, and Critique 52 (2): 138-158. 2014.
    Is it even possible to resist or oppose neoliberalism? I consider two responses that translate musical practices into counter-hegemonic political strategies: Jacques Attali’s theory of “composition” and the biopolitics of “uncool.” Reading Jacques Attali’s Noise through Foucault’s late work, I argue that Attali’s concept of “repetition” is best understood as a theory of neoliberal biopolitics, and his theory composition is actually a model of deregulated subjectivity. Composition is thus not an…Read more
  •  129
    The status of the body figures paradoxically in the interrelated discourses of whiteness, aesthetic taste, and hipness. While Richard Dyer’s analysis of whiteness argues that white identity is “in but not of the body,” Carolyn Korsmeyer’s and Julia Kristeva’s feminist analyses of aesthetic “taste” demonstrate that this faculty is traditionally conceived as something “of” but not “in” the body. While taste directly distances whiteness from embodiment, hipness negatively affirms this same distance…Read more
  •  53
    The musical semiotic
    Philosophy Today 46 (5): 113-119. 2002.
  •  86
    Some feminists have argued that the “master's tools” cannot be utilized for feminist projects. When read through the lens of non-ideal theory, Judith Butler's reevaluation of “autonomy” and “universality” and Peaches's engagement with guitar rock are instances in which implements of patriarchy are productively repurposed for feminist ends. These examples evince two criteria whereby one can judge the success of such an attempt: first, accessibility and efficacy; second, that the use is deconstruc…Read more
  •  480
    I read Sara Kofman's work on Nietzsche, Charles Mills' _The Racial Contract_, and Kodwo Eshun's Afrofuturist musicology to argue that most condemnations of "faking it" in music rest on a racially and sexually problematic fetishization of "the real.".
  •  1693
    Gender, race, and sexuality are not just identities; they are also systems of social organization – i.e., systems of privilege and oppression. This article addresses two main ways privilege and oppression (e.g., racism, misogyny, heteronormativity) are relevant topics in and for philosophical aesthetics: (i) the role of the aesthetic in privilege and oppression, and (ii) the role of philosophical aesthetics, as a discipline and a body of texts, in constructing and naturalizing relations of privi…Read more
  •  2709
    Feminist, critical race, and postcolonial theories have established that social identities such as race and gender are mutually constitutive—i.e., that they “intersect.” I argue that “cultural appropriation” is never merely the appropriation of culture, but also of gender, sexuality, class, etc. For example, “white hipness” is the appropriation of stereotypical black masculinity by white males. Looking at recent videos from black male hip-hop artists, I develop an account of “postmillennial bl…Read more
  •  22
    The Musical Semiotic
    Philosophy Today 46 (Supplement): 113-119. 2002.
  •  983
    From "No Future" to "Delete Yourself "
    Journal of Popular Music Studies 25 (4). 2013.
    Beginning with the role of the Sex Pistols’s “God Save the Queen” in Lee Edelman and J. Jack Halberstam’s debates about queer death and failure, I follow a musical motive from the Pistols track to its reappearance in Atari Teenage Riot’s 1995 “Delete Yourself .” In this song, as in much of ATR’s work from the 1990s, overlapping queer and Afro-diasporic aesthetics condense around the idea of death or “bare life.” ATR’s musical strategies treat this death as a form of de-intensification and divest…Read more