SELECTED WORK
How rogue cell phones unveiled divided attitudes about a ‘new audience’ and why this may be a step backward for diversity in the concert hall.
Extratextual awareness (that is, knowledge outside of a written text), has been a key component for queer representation, which has historically been censored or implied through subversive means. In this article, I discuss how extratextual awareness of a character’s gender identity and subtextual implication of queerness have cemented Strauss’s opera Der Rosenkavalier’s iconic status in the gay subculture. Additionally, I explore how self-identification via extratextual means may offer an imperfect — and at times, problematic — form of queer representation.
UPCOMING WORK
Identifying the Professional Lesbian in the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit: The Silence of the Lambs and Mindhunter
How do professionalism and impersonality in the workplace intersect with expressions of gender and sexuality? Augmented by Lockean and Marxist ideas of work as potential to shape one’s sense of self, I explore how professional expectations of impersonality complicate how female investigators in fictional depictions of the FBI commodify their personal experiences, rendering their explicitly lesbian or lesbian-coded identities invalid or invisible in direct opposition to the homosexual(-coded) male subjects that they investigate.
Diagnosing (and Un-diagnosing) the Camp Aesthetic in Mahler’s Symphonic Works
In her 1961 essay Notes on ‘Camp’, Susan Sontag argues, “For Camp art is often decorative art, emphasizing texture, sensuous surface, and style often at the expense of content. Concert music, though, because it is contentless, is rarely Camp.” In my article, I explore evolving ideas of content in classical music, from the War of the Romantics to contemporary discourse about program and absolute music. Using these varying ideas of content, I investigate how Mahler subverts classical form and content in his symphonic works, thus diagnosing the Camp aesthetic, and subsequently how modern perspectives on Mahler un-diagnose the Camp aesthetic.