Epilogue

The epilogue ties the arguments about vocal expressivity and agency advanced in the previous chapters to questions about accountability, gender, and power raised by recent reports of sexual violence in the music industry. In 2012, Operation Yewtree revealed that high profile celebrities had used their power in the entertainment industry to abuse young people beginning in the 1960s. I ask how the notions of vocal expressivity and sexual liberation that emerged in the 1960s may have enabled these kinds of abuses. This epilogue reflects on how feminist music scholars and critics might honor expressions of agency while condemning abuse. It offers concluding thoughts on how music scholars can listen for agency and demand accountability.

Visualizing Disease and ‘Depravity’ in the Weimar Republic: The Film Roles and Dance Performances of Anita Berber and Otto Dix’s Bildnis der Tänzerin Anita Berber

During Germany’s Weimar Republic (1918–33), women who did not conform to conventional expectations for “proper” female behaviour were met with suspicion and criticism. Due to their embrace of sexual liberation and economic independence, interwar New Women were often unfairly associated with prostitutes and cultural degeneration. Anita Berber, a drug-addicted nude dancer and actress in multiple Aufklärungsfilme, was regarded as the embodiment of debauched modern womanhood. However, her persona intrigued Neue Sachlichkeit artist, Otto Dix, who enjoyed offending bourgeois sensibilities. Dix captured her likeness in the painting Bildnis der Tänzerin Anita Berber (1925) but altered her features to make her look aged and sickly. Amid growing bourgeois fears about postwar societal decay, Dix utilized Berber’s painted body to engage Weimar discourses about the threat of the sexually liberated Neue Frau, the pervasiveness of the so-called depravity of metropolitan life, and the fear of the loosening grip of patriarchal social control.

"No Sorrow, No Pity": Intersections of Disability, HIV/AIDS, and Gay Male Masculinity in the 1980s

This article examines narratives of disease and disability in Canada's gay and lesbian newspaper, The Body Politic (1971-1987), in order to demonstrate how gay male masculinity developed within a gay ableist culture deeply affected by HIV/AIDS. Over the course of the 1980s, two seemingly separate issues of disability and disease were woven together, establishing a dichotomy between the unhealthy and healthy, afflicted and non-afflicted, disabled and non-disabled body, which was marked by tension and, at times, hostility. As a result, two seemingly different discussions of disability and disease in The Body Politic intersected at the site of the gay male body, whereby issues of frailty and undesirability were shaped by pre-existing perceptions around disability. Narratives around disease and disability demonstrate how perceptions of bodily "failure" transferred from the disabled body onto the diseased body during the formative years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic through imagery and text. The aesthetics and language of disability are particularly important for understanding how the disabled body and the HIV/AIDS-afflicted body were culturally framed because the stylization of the body itself was fundamental to the politics of sexual liberation and the formulation of visible lesbian and gay communities.

Alexa, what was an archive?

The evolution of the Archival Science has often taken place in difficult times, because of the frequent social, economic, cultural and political crises which it has encountered and which as well, have helped to shape it, not allowing us however, to speak of a crisis typical of the Archival Science. After all, it must be difficult to begin a construction in the course of different revolutions, some world wars, the emergence of the contemporary avant-garde, the crisis of ‘29, the disappearance of the Big Science, the emergence of various countercultures, the expansion of democracy or sexual liberation: it might be regarded as an abrupt birth, but not because it would be involved in such crises, but because of its ability to be immersed in the richness of those around it.

Periodically Queer: Sexology and Non-Normative Sexualities in the Little Magazine The Masses

This paper will be concerned with the special affordances of periodical writing, taking the modernist little magazine The Masses as its example. This magazine was instrumentally involved in promoting sexual liberation and ‘sex radicalism’ in the United States of the 1910s, and I argue that the – contracted, serial, and contingent – structure of periodical publishing had an incisive impact on the ways in which the magazine responded to and transfigured the contemporary rhetoric of sexology. Focusing on the enactment of non-normative sexualities in the little magazine, I aim to show that the iterative and kaleidoscopic form of presentation yields effects that are different from the aesthetics of queer modernism as manifest in the ‘closed’ literary forms of the episodic novel or the short story collection. I will cast a close look at Floyd Dell's writing in the magazine to argue my case, and end with a reflection on (the publication history of) Sherwood Anderson's ‘Hands’.