“Gender, Sex, Polyphonic Embodiment”
A paper presented by Dr. Stephen Amico at Phenomenology in Ethnomusicology 2018: The St. John’s Conference, June 6–8, 2018, Research Centre for the Study of Music, Media, and Place, Memorial University of Newfoundland.
Critiques of phenomenological analyses have often highlighted what is assumed to be a methodological and epistemological reliance upon a type of transcendental idealism—the flattening out (or bracketing off) of the particular in search of the universal. Such critiques may, of course, be gainsaid by attention to the ways in which numerous theorists—Merleau-Ponty and Lingis, to name only two—have explored the centrality of the corporeal, positing an experiencing subject that is necessarily both embodied and embedded. And although embodiment itself, within the various phenomenological projects, has been problematized insofar as “the” body appears as a masculinist universal, erasing difference related to gender, race, class, or geocultural location, several feminist authors—highlighting the centrality of lived experience to feminist theory and politics—have suggested productive ways to enlist phenomenology in critical analyses of gender. In this paper, focusing on two live concerts by the Russian pop superstar Valeriia in the spring of 2017, I will endeavour to extend this rapprochement between phenomenology and gender studies. Key variables in my analysis include Valeriia’s status as an “aspirational” post-Soviet woman (survivor of domestic abuse, venerated artist, and vocal “patriot”) as well as the concerts’ locations in Tallinn and Tartu (resulting in the construction of a concurrently Estonian/Russian space). Highlighting the corporeally affective puissance of a specifically sonic expressive/aesthetic interaction—exceeding the linguistic, and resisting finitude—as well as the ways in which embodied memory and imagination (related to the indeterminacy of spatial experience) troubles temporal linearity, I will argue that phenomenological analysis holds great potential for contextualized analyses of corporeally specific experience that nonetheless resists the trap of an essentialist sexual dimorphism.
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To cite this video: Amico, Stephen. “Gender, Sex, Polyphonic Embodiment.” Recorded June 5, 2018 at the Research Centre for the Study of Music, Media, and Place at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. Phenomenology in Ethnomusicology 2018: The St. John’s Conference. 22:21. https://youtu.be/crrLglEyZfw
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