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Dans ce texte est proposée une « lecture du genre » (Boisclair 2002) des oeuvres de Philémon Cimon (L’été, Les femmes comme des montagnes), Pierre Lapointe (Pierre Lapointe, Sentiments humains) et Ariane Moffatt (Aquanaute, Le coeur dans la tête, Tous les sens). L’étude des chansons contenues sur ces albums prend pour point de départ une interrogation des subjectivités genrées de ces trois artistes, entre personne réelle et persona, et montre que ces dernières façonnent leurs compositions. La sollicitation du concept de sexe/genre ouvre dès lors la porte à l’exploration des représentations des identités sexuelles et de genre dans ces chansons, où les identités des artistes se trouvent mises en abîme. En s’intéressant à l’énonciation et au discours (en particulier, au discours amoureux) contenu dans le texte des chansons sélectionnées, il est possible de rendre compte de la reproduction des injonctions à l’hétérosexualité et des poncifs qui cloisonnent le genre, ainsi que des glissements et brouillages qui autorisent des resignifications du genre. Ainsi, chez Cimon, on observe la reconduite du point de vue masculin où la valeur du féminin réside dans sa capacité à émerveiller le sujet et à susciter son désir. À l’opposé, les textes de Lapointe et Moffatt dépeignent des personnages et des récits queer, bien que leur identité queer n’ait pas été revendiquée à l’heure de la parution de leurs oeuvres.

Dans la littérature sur la danse exotique de la première moitié du xxe siècle, la danseuse noire apparaît soit comme la victime d’une industrie du divertissement capitalisant sur les mises en scène érotisantes, exotisantes et primitivisantes de son corps, soit comme la parodie subversive du stéréotype dit « primitif-exotique » incarné sur scène. Pour paraphraser bell hooks, le plaisir corporel, voire charnel, lié à la danse est avant tout abordé en tant que réalité à laquelle il faut résister, qui doit être masquée ou transcendée, ce qui force ainsi un processus de distanciation entre le travail artistique de la danseuse et le capital érotique de son corps. Dans cet article, l’auteure s’appuie sur une collection d’entretiens réalisés dans le contexte du travail de recherche ayant mené à la production cinématographique Show Girls: Celebrating Montreal’s Legendary Black Jazz Scene (1999) avec des danseuses qui travaillaient dans l’industrie du spectacle durant l’« âge d’or » du jazz montréalais (1925-1955). Les récits que révèlent ces entretiens permettent d’aller au-delà des questions de représentation dans la littérature sur la danse exotique pour poser un regard sur l’agentivité artistique de ces femmes qui résistent à la désarticulation entre leur travail artistique et le capital érotique de leurs corps.

Audible in speech and song, electro-pop singer Grimes’s so-called “baby doll” lisp generates endless buzz online, ranging from light-hearted adoration, to infantilization, to sexual fetish and even to ableist, misogynist anti-fandom. This article uses the reception of her lisp to build an intersectional theory of lisping across its medical and socio-cultural constructions, bridging work in disability studies, dysfluency studies, voice studies, and popular music studies in the process. I situate the slippage between adoring, infantilizing, fetishistic, and violent characterizations of Grimes’s lisp as reflective of the infantilization of “communicative disorders” in speech language pathology, and the dysfunction associated with feminine coded-speech patterns (e.g. vocal fry and up talk) in the popular imaginary. Lisping is profitably understood as an audible form of “liminal” difference relative to visible physical disabilities (St. Pierre), and to certain ableist, gendered, and racialized conceptions of normative vocality. Ultimately, in the English-speaking world, the lisp is symbolically-coded feminine while exceeding the norms of female vocality, thereby giving rise to a polarizing set of associations that work against female authority and, by extension in Grimes’s case, female musical authorship. Grimes’s reception thus offers a valuable case study for interrogating how misogynist fantasies regarding femininity are thought localized in the female voice, and the symbolic ties between disability and femininity.

After an introduction to the genre »chanson« and its fascination with real life, this article investigates the different ways in which French (and Franco-Canadian) chansons deal with ageing and old age. The study looks at the songs’ lyrics, which describe or represent old age in a manner between stereotype and intimate confession, and at the authentic or inauthentic performance of the chanson by its singer or singer-songwriter. The analyses are followed by an overview of chansons describing the end of the world. It can be shown that many of these songs focus on the feelings of lovers facing the apocalypse and that in more than one case chansons envisioning the last moments of the world contain a mixture of fear and parody.

Vivier: A Night Report is a kind of poetical archive of musical details, protocols, experiences, concepts, memories, fears, desires and sorrows connected to Canadian composer Claude Vivier's (1948-1983) unusual destiny. All characters from Marko Nikodijević's opera originate from Vivier's life and works but they are re-indexed, or reenacted differently. The countertenor voice of Vivier is what primarily makes him different from all the rest of the characters. Even it could be claimed that the rest of the voices are dominated by Vivier's vocal presence on stage. Vivier stands as symbol for minority, queer, vulnerable. During his short life he was trying to get his own voice, voice as the personification of freedom and possibility to be heard. Finally he gets vivid, imaginative opera in which both his physical and personified voices are shining by creativity that his art emanate. He gets his singing voice, and he finally gets heard.

Cette analyse aborde le cas singulier de la circulation de la chanson J’attendrai dans la culture des années 1940, dont l’analyse des variantes permet de cerner les rapports mouvants d’une chanson aux genres chansonniers et musicaux, aux goûts et aux pratiques du public, ainsi qu’à leur ancrage au sein des champs culturels nationaux. Elle permet même, parfois, de sonder les modalités de l’évolution des modèles des rapports sociaux entre les sexes présents dans différentes versions. Ce sont ainsi autant les enjeux artistiques, culturels, sociaux et intimes à l’oeuvre qui guident notre analyse de ce cas de transfert culturel, que le repérage de vecteurs permettant de formuler une équation de la circulation culturelle des chansons à succès. , This article deals with the singular case of the circulation of the song J’attendrai in the 1940s. The analysis of the different versions of the song allows us to reveal the changing relationship between these versions and musical genres, the tastes and practices of the public, and the way they fit into national cultures. This analysis also allows us, in places, to explore the evolution of social relationships between genders as presented in the different versions of the song. This way, our analysis of this case of cultural transfer is guided as much by the artistic, cultural, social and intimate aspects of the song, as by a search for the vectors explaining the cultural circulation of a successful song.

Dans le contexte de travaux plus larges portant sur l’histoire de la chanson à succès par l’analyse des préférences musicales des lectrices du Bulletin des agriculteurs dans les années 1940, nous nous intéressons ici aux éléments qui permettent de comprendre les modalités par lesquelles les goûts musicaux témoignent de l’émergence d’une modernité culturelle au Québec dans les années 1940. Deux postulats orientent notre perspective. Le premier consiste à supposer l’existence d’une modernité culturelle « populaire » qui transite par la forme, les supports et la technologie. Le second sonde la façon dont les thèmes intimes et la focalisation sur l’expression du sentiment amoureux marquent une transformation des valeurs et, surtout, explore les marques formelles et discursives qui portent ces valeurs dans la chanson à succès. , As part of a larger research project on the history of popular song, which analyzes the musical preferences of the female readers of the Bulletin des agriculteurs in the 1940s, this article focuses on those elements that allow for an understanding of the modalities by which these women’s musical tastes reflected the emergence of a cultural modernity in Quebec during that decade. Two basic premises orient my perspective on the subject. The first presupposes the existence of a “popular” cultural modernity based on form, equipment, and technology. The second explores both the way in which intimate themes and the importance given to expressions of love reflected a shift in values, as well as the formal and discursive markers that transmitted these values in popular song.

The music of Rufus Wainwright has been afforded much critical acclaim thanks to the singer-songwriter’s understanding of Queer cultural history, and the candor with which he explores (homo)sexuality in his music. This case study seeks to examine his use of opera in particular, and how Wainwright uses the historical trope of the opera queen to incorporate his own queerness into music, thus asserting an authority of difference and challenging the dominant (hetero)norm constructions of masculinity in popular music. Wainwright disregards any cultural framework imposed by heternormativism, and reclaims the Orphic figure of operatic authority as one of queer power through this absence. By drawing on his own relationship with opera, Wainwright exploits the right this gives him by reinterpreting cultural history, and revising the pejorative stereotype that is an opera queen.

In the 1930s, Mary Travers wrote folk songs dealing with the thorny issue of the working poor during hard times. A self-styled “woman at the service of the community”, she focused on those who lost their jobs as a result of the economic crisis. Heeding tradition, she lauded the work of famers whom she perceived as the mythical representatives of an idealised “old era”. How did she reconcile her songs praising tradition with an increasingly industrial labour market ? How did she react to women entering the workforce ? What did she think of government actions in the face of dwindling employment and pressing poverty ? Did she consider herself to be a career woman, what with hers being the first successful recordings of Quebec folk songs ? Confronting or buttressing established taboos such as those about women in the workforce, she wrote songs reflecting those societal issues prevalent at the time. Yet, she set herself apart both through her trade as a songwriter and her depiction of it. The economic situation in the province of Quebec influenced how labour was perceived, and her writings, favouring the standpoint of a working woman from the lower classes where employment is a matter of both survival and pride, echoed this perception with originality. A sociological and critical analysis of her songs illustrates the societal discourse on labour that prevailed during hard times.