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Depuis les récits retraçant ses premières heures, la scène rap montréalaise apparaît particulièrement investie par des acteurs d’origine haïtienne : un fait notamment palpable à travers les textes de rap, qui présentent fréquemment des occurrences en créole haïtien. Prenant acte de cette caractéristique du rap montréalais, nous proposons une réflexion sur les enjeux de la visibilité des migrants et descendants de migrants haïtiens au sein de l’espace public québécois, à travers une focalisation sur les pratiques et expériences de rappeuses montréalaises d’origine haïtienne. Dans cette contribution, qui vise à entrevoir les processus de majoration et de minoration à l’oeuvre dans le contexte montréalais et québécois, nous envisagerons notamment la manière dont les vecteurs de différenciation impliquant ce qui relève du linguistique, de la « québéquicité » ou des rapports sociaux de sexe s’actualisent et se reproduisent dans le cadre de la médiatisation des productions artistiques.

This research-creation dissertation focuses on the emergence of electroclash as a dominant form of electronic dance music in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Electroclash combines the extended pulsing sections of techno, house and other dance musics with the trashier energy of rock and new wave. The genre signals an attempt to reinvigorate dance music with a sense of sexuality, personality and irony. Electroclash also emphasizes, rather than hides, the European, trashy elements of electronic dance music. This project addresses the following questions: what is distinct about the genre and its related practices, both in and out of the studio? Why do rock and electro come together at this point and in this way? Why is electroclash affectively powerful for musicians, audiences and listeners? And, what does the genre portend in terms of our understandings of the politics of electronic music? The coming together of rock and electro is examined vis-à-vis the ongoing changing sociality of music production/distribution and the changing role of the producer. Numerous women, whether as solo producers or in the context of collaborative groups, significantly contributed to shaping the aesthetics and production practices of electroclash, an anomaly in the history of popular music and electronic music where the role of the producer has typically been associated with men. These changes are discussed in relation to the way key electroclash producers often used a hybrid approach to production involving the integration of new(er) technologies, such as laptops containing various audio production software with older, inexpensive keyboards, microphones, samplers and drum machines to achieve the ironic backbeat laden hybrid electro-rock sound.

The life story of Mrs. Daisy Sweeney, an African Canadian native of Montreal, Quebec, helps fill a void in the historical documentation of Montreal Blacks (especially female elders). Of particular significance is her prominence as a music educator and othermother during her life. The current literature on African Canadian othermothering experiences is not synonymous with both White or African American females and inclusion of their voices in academic, as well as mainstream spaces, is virtually non-existent. This dissertation asks: What did it mean to be a first generation 'Negro' working class bilingual female in a largely hostile White francophone Quebec metropolis in the early 20th Century? How can her narratives help shape and inform life history and African Canadian othermothering research? My sojourn with Mrs. Daisy Sweeney referenced African centered epistemology in my conceptual understanding of herself and community mothering. Capturing her conversations meant engaging with multiple methodologies articulated through African oral traditions, life history, archival canons and interdisciplinary inquiries. It is striking to note that there were not only certain tensions associated with memory loss and physical limitations (prompted by the aging process) that destabilized and enriched our 'interactive' communication, but also revealed a rupture and reversal of the participant/researcher dynamic. In spite of blatant racial discrimination that plagued Montreal's Black communities during that time, Daisy Sweeney fulfilled a life-long dream and taught hundreds of children the canon of classical piano for over 50 years. She lived her voice through her music, finding ways to validate her own identity and empowering others in the process. She used the musical stage as her platform to draw invaluable connections between race, gender, language and social class. Daisy Sweeney's generation of othermothers is dying out and, as the carriers of culture, the urgency to tell their stories must be emphasized. The account respects, reclaims and reflects those voices. It is time to write in African Canadian female elders and diversify the exclusionary genre of life history and archival research.

Hildegard Westerkamp's (1990) composition École Polytechnique is an artistic response to one of Canada's most profoundly disturbing mass murders, the 1989 slaying of fourteen women in Montreal, Quebec. Using the theoretical model, derived from Haraway, of the cyborg body, and analyzing the import of the mixed media (voices, instruments and electroacoustic tape) incorporated in the music, the authors examine the impact this work has had on some of those who have heard it and performed it, based on the responses of choristers and listeners in several studies. The authors explored how those who engaged significantly with the music, (including those who had no personal association with the actual events of the 1989 massacre), were able to make relevant connections between their own experience and the composition itself, embrace these connections and their disturbing resonances, and thereby experience meaningful emotional growth.

Throughout his ascendancy in fame and cultural visibility, singer/songwriter and gay pop icon Rufus Wainwright's output has been consistently related, by scholars and critics alike, to camp aesthetics, modes of artistic expression typically understood as emerging from queer communities, particularly certain gay male populations, but ones whose political potential is highly contested. Traditional conceptions of camp, as most famously articulated by Susan Sontag in the 1960s, emphasize style over content, necessarily rendering it politically-disengaged. However, scholars have vehemently challenged conceptions like Sontag's, in order to reclaim camp as a potent means to facilitate queer world-making and a powerful resistance to heteronormativity. I examine Wainwright's image and music in order to theorize a new queer interpretive listening position. Specifically, I draw upon the literary perspective of “reparative reading,” articulated by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in opposition to what she describes as “paranoid reading,” to propose a uniquely queer approach to musical and cultural historiography, exemplified by Wainwright's music. Much of the current queer musicology focuses on lost histories, systematic marginalization, and the commoditization of queer identities. While such approaches have produced important insights, thorough examination of the relationships between queer cultural products and their queer reception has proven elusive. This project suggests a unique approach to understanding the musical construction of a specific kind of queer masculinity, one which combines authorial creation with reparative conceptions of reception, in order to theorize a uniquely gay male interpretive position. When viewed through a theoretical lens combining politically-potent conceptions of camp performativity with a reparative reading position, Wainwright's music strikingly enacts Philip Brett's call to claim, not historical evidence, but the right of interpretation, emerging as an act of resistance via the reclamation and consolidation of a queer interpretive authority. In this way, Wainwright articulates both a rupture in the history of queer masculinity and a powerful means of resistance to the often-exclusionary relationships between literary, musical, and artistic objects and the heteronormative cultural systems in which they are created.

Cet article propose une incursion dans le domaine de l’écologie sonore à partir d’articles écrits par des artistes et des chercheuses de divers horizons disciplinaires. Après avoir abordé les principes fondamentaux de cette discipline qui a vu le jour durant les années 70, l’auteure présente les pratiques émergentes des femmes en écologie sonore de façon à démontrer ce en quoi leurs façons de faire constituent un terrain propice à la recherche féministe. Le rapport entre l’écologie sonore et le féminisme étant établi, l’auteure expose le sommaire de trois rapports de recherche d’intérêt sociopolitique dont la démarche s’apparente à la recherche-action féministe. Ses réflexions portent ensuite sur les moyens à prendre pour favoriser la collaboration interdisciplinaire.

La musique actuelle née au tournant des années 1970-1980 a connu ses heures de gloire pendant de nombreuses années. Trois femmes font partie de la lancée et demeurent à ce jour des musiciennes actives et des administratrices hors pair. Mais d’autres, artistes sonores plutôt qu’instrumentistes, émergent, au moment du tournant technologique et plus particulièrement au milieu des années 1990. Un nombre important de ces femmes développent des pratiques non instrumentales d’art audio, de musique bruitiste, de musiques mixtes, électroniques expérimentales, d’installation et de multimédia. Elles sont mal connues, méconnues des grands médias et de la plupart des lieux d’enseignement de la musique, bien que plusieurs d’entre elles les aient fréquentés. Ce moment de rencontre avec certaines d’entre elles souhaite les faire apparaître, en plein jour.

Si les spéculations idéologiques concernant les différences biologiques entre les sexes persistent dans le domaine de la création, elles ont été mises en valeur dès 1970 par des écrivaines et plasticiennes pour oeuvrer en fonction de mythes spécifiques touchant à leur féminité, au corps de la femme chargé de stigmates, afin qu’émerge un « art féminin ». D’une certaine manière, des compositrices vont emprunter cette voie en affirmant entretenir un rapport différent de celui des hommes à l’écriture musicale. Selon elles, leur sensibilité spécifique et leur situation d’être au monde les poussent à travailler autrement, à partir de thématiques « existentielles » inspirées de leur condition sociale et culturelle. De telles circonstances ont provoqué cette quête identitaire par l’invention d’un style artistique particulier qui, paradoxalement, use de ce qui était considéré par un féminisme radical comme les pièges de la féminité. Cet article tente de montrer que ces spécificités, du moins ces constantes relevées par les créatrices expliquant leur démarche, sont le résultat de recherches esthétiques pour caractériser une création universelle au féminin, et non le produit de diktats biologiques.

Singer-composer Rufus Wainwright uses specific musical gestures to reference historical archetypes of urban, gay masculinity on his 2002 album Poses. The cumulative result of his penchant for pastiche, eschewal of traditional musical boundaries, and self-described hedonism, Poses represents Wainwright's direct engagement with the politics of identity and challenges dominant constructions of (homo)sexuality and masculinity in popular music. Drawing from a vast lexicon of musical styles, he assembles an idiosyncratic persona, ignoring several decades of pop with an "utter lack of machismo [and] a freedom that comes to outsiders disinterested in meeting the requirements of the dreary status quo." Though analysis of musical and lyrical characteristics of Poses, I establish a dialectic between Wainwright's musical persona and four historical modes of urban gay masculinity: the 19th Century English Dandy, the French flaneur, the 20th Century gay bohemian, and the "Clone." In doing so, I introduce Wainwright as a reinvigorating force, resuscitating the subversive potential of radical gay sexuality as a 21st Century model for imagining gay male subjectivity.