Queer sonic cultures: An affective walking-composing project

“intersectional concerns of race, gender, and dis/ability determine what kinds of bodies are allowed to walk where (and in this case, the where is Brexit-era Britain). This article attempts to navigate the complexity of these tensions contextualizing a five-day walking research-creation project along St. Cuthbert’s Way that we called Queer Sonic Cultures. As academics and artists interested in the relationship between walking and composition, our initial proposition was to become affected as we walked and to create sonic cultures (songs) using whatever affected us along the way.”

“The Academic Liner Notes begin with a brief description of the location of the walk, contextualized within the tradition of walking and composing in the British landscape, and the use of sound-based methods and literature to represent such landscapes. In this section we trouble the whiteness and cis-hetero heritage of walking and art in rural Britain” — my use of queer/trans/Black sound theory as troubling the cis-het-whiteness of walking

Queer Theory

As queer artists and academics we draw queerly on the body of scholarship known as queer theory in queering walking, nature and composition. After Eli Clare (2001), we use the term queer in its “general sense, as odd, quirky, not belonging; and in its specific sense, as referring to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender identity” (361), to which we would append other non-normative sexual or gender identities. Queer research can be “any form of research positioned within conceptual frameworks that highlight the instability of taken-for-granted meanings and resulting power relations” (Browne and Nash, 2010: 4). We activate queer as both a noun and a verb in our scholarship.

Colonialism

Walking in nature is a big deal in Britain. Britain’s walking heritage includes many ancient trackways, green lanes, and footpaths (e.g. the Pilgrim’s Way from Winchester and Canterbury) that walkers and pilgrims continue to use. There is a preponderance of scholastic writing and guidebooks about walking in the UK. Centuries of literature from Chaucer to Austen to Woolf feature characters strolling in the landscape or through cities. Numerous authors use walking as a narrative device, literary theme, or as a method for generating content such as Wordsworth’s romantic strolls in the Truman & Shannon, 2018 4 Lake District. There are also books about walking as a lost art and books on where to walk as part of the pervasive stereotyping of Britain’s ‘green and pleasant land.’ Music demonstrates a similar link between nature and nation. —- this is good bc my project uses both walking in nature and music - good for discussing colonialism!

And yet, after Alison Kafer (2013), we are led to wonder what ‘passes’ in/as Nature? The sound of footfalls and majority enunciations of English would perhaps seem more natural than alternative movement habits (such as automatic wheelchairs), and neurologically and racially diverse speech patterns in the countryside. As queer subjects walking in the landscape we might be marked as ‘unnatural.’ However, during our walk our cis-genders and whiteness insisted we be read as a ‘straight’ couple and pass in ways that others never could (“Your… husband? Oh, I’m sorry! Boyfriend.”). Carolyn Knowles (2008) discusses how whiteness is produced and flourishes in rural Britain and is bolstered by histories (and the ongoing presence) of colonialism and slavery. For Knowles, the British “countryside stands for more than it is: it produces, embodies and sustains whiteness on behalf of the nation” (170) and maintains a position as the core of British identity.

Springgay and Truman (2018a) critique how walking, when framed through romantic poets and naturalists — and, we argue, music composers — operates as a privileged (ableist) practice and a white cis-heteronormative time-space. The literary tradition is steeped in tales of lone (white) male walkers setting out into the wild in search of inspiration in ways that racialized, gendered, and dis/abled bodies historically (and still) could not. According to John Wylie (2005), a walk in the English countryside “involves at least some attunement with the various sensibilities still distilling from sublime and romantic figurations of the self, travel, landscape and nature” (235).

The link between nature, walking, and creativity has been discussed in many fields, and frequently scholars have conducted research that attends specifically to sound and sonic walks in varied landscapes (Lorimer & Wylie, 2010; Gallagher, 2016). What are commonly referred to as soundwalks are often used to explore the “sonic ecologies of place” (Springgay and Truman, 2017: 35). Phonographic field recordings in nature typically aspire to a sonic representation of place, wherein sounds are selected either for their socio-sonic veracity or else their spectomorphological properties (Rennie, 2014). In these productions, the sounds of the recordist are minimized or erased, and they often go to great lengths to avoid registering any anthropogenic sounds in order to enact a romanticized notion of the ‘natural’ (Gallagher, 2015; Michael, 2011). Increasingly, fields such as geomorphology are attempting an artistic representation of landscape, where Nature provides “aesthetic inspiration” to the extent that past geomorphological transformations can be discerned from historical images, literary accounts and songs (Tooth et al., 2016: 1793; Griffiths et al., 2018).

Research-Creation and Queerness

Research-creation is the interrelated practice of art, theory, and research (Truman & Springgay, 2015); it is a “thinking-with and across techniques of creative practice” (Manning & Massumi, 2014: 88-89) that moves away from approaches to qualitative research that assume data can be collected, extracted, and then represented, and towards an affective, emergent, relational and more-thanrepresentational approach to doing-research (Thrift, 2007; McCormack, 2008; Truman, 2016). We also suggest that a research-creation event invokes a queer temporality in its disruption of regular space-time delineations.

Affect

Affect has been theorized from within a variety of academic lineages (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010). We understand affect within our research-creation practice as “the becoming sensation, a force or intensity manifested at the surface of the body” (Springgay and Zaliwska, 2017: 276-277), “found in those intensities that pass body to body… in those resonances that circulate about, between…” (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010: 1), felt-or-not, capacitating and debilitating further affectivity (Massumi, 2015; Puar, 2017).

Similar to our critiques of the whiteness of walking and creative inspiration in the landscape, we critique affect studies for sometimes erasing patterns of marginalization, and reinscribing compulsory white, hetero, europhallic (Moten, 2003) ablebodiedness (Ahmed, 2004, 2010; Weheliye, 2014; McRuer, 2016; Palmer, 2017; Puar, 2017). When affect is depoliticized and assumes a neutral circulation, as well as (state-sanctioned) capacity for affectation, it masks its conflation of neutral as white. This re-centers whiteness and ‘Man’ as a universal category (Wynter, 2003). Universal Man affects but is never affected. He circulates, builds capacity, and sticks to everything, but nothing sticks to him.

More-than-representational practices perform a queer temporality. Each sonic culture is a pressing together of ever-multiplying spatial, temporal, and affective emplacements that otherwise could never have touched; relived, re-represented, in a queering of chronological time (similar to our critiques of affect and walking studies above, queer studies has been critiqued for re-centering whiteness and class privilege – Puar, 2007; Muñoz, 2010).

More than Archives

Rather than understanding our sonic cultures as a repository that documents and represents our walking-composing project, we understand them as a kind of “anarchive” (Murphie, 2016: np). Andrew Murphie (2016) discusses how anarchives, unlike official archives, resist interpretation and allow us to instead focus on the affective and material process of production — in this case, sonicaffective. The sonic cultures don’t capture the walk, but more-than-represent it in each anarchival listening