Abstract
This artistic research is an emergent, situated thinking of freely improvised musicking through the lens of queer and feminist theory. It pursues a post-qualitative inquiry founded in collaboratively thinking-with a series of companions: myself as an artist and as a queer feminist, my musicking and thinking communities, six conversation companions, and six companion texts. Along with these companion-thinkers, I explore three entangled points of inquiry: “unmastering” the habits of institutional musicking and the persistent presence of the master-Man; interrogating the notion of “freedom” in free improvisation, its history and its situated meaning for a queer-feminist white settler musicker on stolen, unceded Aboriginal land; and the possibilities of collaboration founded in notions of contamination, interdependence, changing and being changed. Thinking-with companions and with musicking is explored as a curious and iterative practice, with voices and ideas arising recurrently throughout the text. Free improvisation is a generative site for soundmaking as kinmaking—musickin: intimacy formed via contact and exchange. The sweaty concept of “free”, however, becomes a prompt to reckon with complicity. By staying with this trouble, the queer-feminist free improviser practices response-able musicking in contaminated human and more-than-human collaborations.
| Original language | English |
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| Qualification | Doctor of Philosophy |
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| Publication status | Unpublished - 16 Nov 2021 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- unmastering
- freedom
- queer-feminist
- musicking
- feminist theory
- history