Introduction

Abstract

‘Film music’ and ‘queerness’ were, for many years, marginalized areas of academic interest, relegated to ignoble statuses such as ‘low art’ or ‘underground’ culture. This book looks at ways that queerness intersects film and its synchronized musical audio tracks. Recent developments in scholarship have encouraged, if not demanded, this interrogation. Books such as Feminine Endings, The Queer Composition of America’s Sound, Queering the Pitch, and Queering the Popular Pitch, to name a few, have pursued lines of inquiry into music that take into account queerness, gender, and sexuality. Music, Sound, and the Moving Image published a special issue on ‘Gender, Sexuality, and The Soundtrack’ (2012: 6.2). The Journal of the American Musicological Society published a colloquy on ‘Music and Sexuality’ (2013: 66.3: 825–72). James Buhler’s essay ‘Gender, Sexuality, and the Soundtrack’ (2014), published during the writing of this book, proffers challenges and directions that a book such as this one might tackle. By now it must be accepted, even by detractors within the academy, that current discourses in musicology and cinema studies regard gender and sexuality as essential facets of human identity and culture that create new ways of critically analyzing cinema and music.