Fiona Magowan & Louise Wrazen 
Performing Gender, Place, and Emotion in Music 
Global Perspectives

While ethnomusicologists and anthropologists have long recognized the theoretical connections between gender, place, and emotion in musical performance, these concepts are seldom analyzed together.
Performing Gender, Place, and Emotion in Music is the first book-length study to examine the interweaving of these three concepts from a cross-cultural perspective. Contributors show how a theoretical focus one dimension implicates the others, creating anexus of performative engagement. This process is examined across different regions around the globe, through two key questions: How are aesthetic, emotional, and imagined relations between performers and places embodied musically? And in what ways is this performance of emotion gendered across quotidian, ritual, and staged events?

Through ethnographic case studies, the volume explores issues of emplacement, embodiment, and emotion in three parts: landscape and emotion; memory and attachment; and nationalism and indigeneity. Part I focuses on emplaced sentiments in Australasia through Vietnamese spirit possession, Balinese dance, and land rights in Aboriginal performance. Part II addresses memories of Aboriginal choral singing, belonging in Bavarian music-making, and gender-performativity in Polish song. Part III evaluates emotion and fandom around a Korean singer in Japan, and Sámi interconnectivitiesin traditional and modern musical practices. Beverley Diamond provides a thought-provoking commentary in the afterword.


Contributors: Beverley Diamond, Fiona Magowan, Jonathan Mc Intosh, Barley Norton, Tina K. Ramnarine, Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg, Sara R. Walmsley-Pledl, Louise Wrazen, Christine Yano.


Fiona Magowan is Professor of Anthropology at Queen’s University, Belfast.

Louise Wrazen is Associate Professor of Music at York University.

Table of Content

Introduction: Musical Intersections, Embodiments, and Emplacements – Fiona Magowan and Louise Wrazen

Engendering Emotion and the Environment in Vietnamese Music and Ritual – Barley Norton

Gendering Emotional Connections to the Balinese Landscape: Exploring Children’s Roles in a Barong Performance – Jonathan Mc Intosh

Performing Emotion, Embodying Country in Australian Aboriginal Ritual – Fiona Magowan

Christian Choral Singing in Aboriginal Australia: Gendered Absence, Emotion, and Place – Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg

Transforming the Singing Body: Exploring Musical Narratives of Gender and Place in East Bavaria – Sara R. Walmsley-Pledl

A Place of Her Own: Gendered Singing in Poland’s Tatras – Louise Wrazen

Singing the Contentions of Place: Korean Singers of the Heart and Soul of Japan – Christine Yano

‘In Our Foremothers’ Arms’: Goddesses, Feminism, and the Politics of Emotion in Sámi Songs – Tina K. Ramnarine

Afterword – Beverley Diamond

Selected Bibliography

List of Contributors

Index