distance
Queering Spaces Through Sound
A Visual Essay (and work in progress) by Abigail Lindo
Existing: Imagined Identities and Bodies Among Sound
Jarvis (2014) describes the nature of androcentric urbanism and how men controlling city planning lessens how the spaces are able to cater to the needs of women. Cities have historically been planned and developed to suit the needs of men, elevating industries benefiting men as the “struggle over space and representation” forced men to develop a “masculine City-as-Citidel” over a “feminine City-as-Garden” (Jarvis 2014, 9). This binarized approach to city building neglects “working-class industrial communities” as it aims to separate residential areas as feminine and industry sites as masculine (Jarvis 2014, 11). With open air concerts, like the majority of those that occur during Tremor, the city is equal to natural landscape, equalized as soundscapes. Events take place within cities and natural spaces outside of cities but the two are in close proximity to one another, in recognition and spatiality. Neither space is explicitly viewed as a space for labor or pleasure more than the other, since farming is a major industry on the island and herds of cows can be seen crossing busy roads – literally bridging the rural and industrial. The feminine and masculine and somewhat neutralized, with the major difference being the amount of noise from other sources, the level of sound amplification, and the number of roads.
Many Tremor attendees (tourist and local alike) I spoke with had progressive personal politics that allowed them to remain fluid in their understanding of the varied gender performance of others. But the hegemonic masculinity in the region still perpetuates an arcane family structure, where men are expected to be the breadwinners and women are expected to work more in the home than in occupations outside of the home. These beliefs also limit a liberal understanding of LGBTQI perspectives and humanity. My interlocutor and colleague, a fellow graduate student residing in Ribeira Grande (a small city on the island), is a member of the queer community and expressed her distain for this reality because nondiscriminatory practices are used to maintain appearances, while her and her partner (and gay men to a greater extent) are shunned in society for breaking this normalized perception of romantic relationship dynamics and for choosing a lesser understood performance of masculinity. Throughout my week on the island, specifically in festival spaces, I observed a counterculture concerned with expressivity and challenging gendered expectations and discriminatory practices furthered by the Catholicism in the country, something they perform bodily and through interactions in the musical spaces created by secular festivals.
In festival spaces, LGBTQI individuals exist in community with music lovers with shared cultural ideals and gendered awareness. They are given the opportunity to shape new geographies of their own on the landscape. Since “geography is always human” and “humanness is always geographic” (“blood, bones, hands, lips, wrists, this is your land, your planet, your road, your sea”), queer individuals speak new meanings onto the land through their temporary engagement in these music festivals and among others in the space (McKittrick 2006, ix). It can be argued that the sound itself represents a queering of the sonic space, which is often dominated by traditional music and popular music from the United States, the Caribbean, and Western Europe. Both realities are reminders of the limited temporality of music festival spaces like Tremor, furthering an awareness of their necessity on the island and as an aspect of Portuguese musical engagement annually.