...Judith A. Peraino Duke University Press 2003 LISTENING TO THE SIRENS Music As Queer Ethical Practice Judith A. Peraino The history of Western music is, among other things, a history of sexual anxiety, ambivalence, and negotiation. This article examines four moments in this musical...

.... Judith A. Peraino is assistant professor of music at Cornell University. She has pub- lished articles on medieval music, music and sexuality, and gender and rock music. Her book Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity is forthcoming. ...

... as the “smiler with the knife” is the stronger. With the emergency siren sounding at the beginning and the end, Looking for Langston indicates that its meditation on the past is a response to present pressing concerns. We can understand this film’s turn to the past as a version of what...

... community serves as a political backdrop for Looking for Langston , which Julien made while he was based in London. As film theorist Kara Keeling ( 2009 : 570) observes, “With the emergency siren sounding at the beginning and the end, Looking for Langston indicates that its meditation on the past...

... .” In The Oxford Handbook of Queerness and Music , edited by Maus Fred Whiteley Sheila . New York : Oxford University Press . Peraino Judith A. 2005 . Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to “Hedwig.” Berkeley : University of California Press...

... fever, honed by the risk of discovery and the pro- pinquity of forbidden texts. At home for winter break, we’re told, Alison “fled to the local college library” where, “again, the sirens called” (217). These panels’ lack of dialogue suggests both the library’s conventional hush...

... out of five doctors agree: no sex for gay men in combination with the sound of a European police siren and images of a naked, leather-masked man with a number tattooed on his side. Subtlety is not the point. Testing the Limits employs footage of a panel discussion with Simon...

... three she reads: “I am enraged at my parents for laughing at the sound of sirens for air raid. We hide under the stairs in the dark. I'm already bored at this game of hide and seek. Death is so close its face is almost pixelated”; age nine: “In the West, time is linearized on a betamax tape with two...

..., the sun . . .” and suggests that it is not only aligned with death, but is a powerful temptation toward death, drawing the living out of the boundaries of life. God is a “Siren” and is disruptive of life in ways that inform sexual desire and aesthetic inspiration: “[Wlhen we want to see God we...

...- ately has sex with a man who was “transported by [his] cool beauty. . . . Ulysses’ sirens had begun to sing ‘Love Me Tender’ and the Cree Adonis could taste, upon the buds that lined his tongue, warm honey” (Highway 1998: 120 – 21). The return of the song “Love Me Tender” and the honey in this new...

... deeply mistrusted the parading of sexuality in public. For the vast majority of intellectuals and worker activists who joined the Bolshevik Party, plea- sure was a dangerous siren leading backward to the capitalist market, not a trans- formational force that could be harnessed...

... gowns, collars, and earrings. They stare at different points outside the boundaries of the photograph—two straight at the camera, one into the horizon, and the remaining one at the bottom-right corner. One cannot help but stare at the hembrita in the front whose gown ends in a siren tail. She toys...

... of the body and look up rather than down, to the trepidation the pilgrim feels in moving through the flames and exchanging masters (Virgil for Beatrice, man for woman), we see that Dante remains tempted by the sirens’ strains. THE HOMOEROTIC SUBJECT IN DANTE’S...

... blow this place wide open (31). In a breathtaking act of imperial arrogance, Doreen assumes that Beka will leap at the opportunity and succumb to the siren call of the West. She eagerly inhabits the role of what Tavia Nyong o (2012: 51) calls the humanitarian angel swooping in to rescue...