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In a recent interview, filmmaker Fronza Woods reflected on early audience reactions to her 1983 short Fannie’s Film, a portrait of a Black cleaning woman, recalling that this audience “didn’t want to see a Black cleaning woman . . . who was happy with her life.” This essay takes Fannie’s Film’s proposition of a “Black cleaning woman who was happy with her life” as a point of departure to argue that Woods’s film offers a critical commentary on the expectations that shape the appearance of the Black reproductive worker in counterhegemonic cinema. Reading Fannie’s Film in relation to a broader archive of largely Black feminist cinema from the 1970s and 1980s that center on the (Black) reproductive worker’s affect and interiority, the article shows how Fannie’s Film interrogates the misalignment between its protagonist’s “happiness” and prominent approaches to apprehending the Black reproductive worker as a political subject.

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This introduction to the special dossier proposes a way of thinking with sound that foregrounds its relational, embodied, and historically situated nature. Rejecting both sonic abstraction and disciplinary overdetermination, the authors advocate for a polyvocal, politically engaged sound studies. The introduction concludes with a brief overview of the contributions that follow.

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It’s difficult to write about the music of Meredith Monk because it, as Adam Shatz writes, “dissolves the usual markers of time, asking us to inhabit two temporal zones at once.” This essay-poem takes up the challenge by revisiting two performances of Monk’s recent work Indra’s Net (2023): at the Park Avenue Armory on October 6, 2024 and at Mills College on November 12, 2021. The piece moves fluidly between these two performances, with occasional flights into other times, spaces, texts, and contexts.

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This essay considers three forms of American music named and forever identified with the ordinary spaces where they arose: the street corner, the garage, and the basement. It cuts critical dispositions from musicology and sound studies together with the historical study of vernacular architecture, questioning the affordances of anonymous, serialized building and landscape types to forms of dissident reuse that their designers could not have foreseen and likely would have sought to curtail. Each reciprocity of space and sound proves differently diagnostic of the racially divided American city as remade after the Second World War: downtown, through Urban Renewal’s bulldozer-led clearance and redevelopment; at and beyond the city’s edge, through the elaboration of bulldozer-graded, automobile-oriented suburban landscapes of enclosure, both above and, significantly, below ground. The essay reimagines the stadial historical geography of the American metropolis in terms of music and sound, and it reconsiders musical genre in terms of its spatial genesis. It provokes meditations on the sonic ontology of the built environment, and it suggests ways to overhear, in these resonant scenes set in train by large-scale demolition, clues to how America’s underdetermined urban forms have harbored—and may yet disclose—the forces of their own unmaking.

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With reference to examples of contemporary amateur singing performances, and drawing on sound theory, Asian studies, and affect theory, this essay continues Rey Chow’s ongoing work on sound and voice with a newer focus on questions of intimacy, alienation, the mutation of collective space, and the possible connotations of the notion of fuite (flight).

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A deeply personal and theoretical exploration of trans sound, an expansive concept that spans gender, nation, language, and music, this essay links trans sound not only to music by trans people but also to modes of listening and orientation that are trans—meaning across, beyond, or through gender, language, and nation. The piece also unpacks the Orientalist reception of Ottoman music in Europe, where the “singing Turk” represented hypermasculine alterity, and contrasts it with Bülent Ersoy’s reappropriation of Ottoman classical music. The essay transitions into a discussion of trans dissonance, anchored in Sandy Stone’s response to trans exclusion within feminist music communities (notably the Olivia Records controversy). Stone’s concept of “posttransexual dissonance” refers to the refusal to resolve or erase the complexities and contradictions of trans identity. Drawing from acoustics, the essay defines dissonance as an “enhancement of the audible”—a metaphor for the visibility and audibility of trans presence. Finally, the article questions how trans sound is audited, suggesting that traditional listening practices may miss its nuances.

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In the genealogy of sound studies, the figures of Pierre Schaeffer and R. Murray Schafer have loomed large, the former bequeathing key concepts of sound objects and acousmatic listening, the latter the idea of soundscapes. Relatively neglected have been Schaeffer’s elaboration of sonic morphology and typology, as well as Schafer’s ecological impetus. This essay returns to and links these aspects of these writers’ works, focusing on the troubling example in poetry, sound description, and first-wave sonic ecology of the “song” of the cicada to suggest how a more critical sonic ecology might be forged—one that extends what is useful in their contributions but does not rely on the implicit embraces of purity hidden in the valuation of reduced listening (Schaeffer) and the mystical praise of silence (Schafer) and that instead makes explicit the noisy grounds of auditory dissensus and the limitations of anthropocentric listening.

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This conversation with the poet, scholar, and theorist Fred Moten begins with the proposition that sound blurs easy distinctions between matter and thought. In this way, sound provides an opening to what Moten calls “moments of disruption, of going off the track, of accident, of rupture, of breakage.” Cacophonous sounds have long served to orient and ground Moten’s analysis of the interplay between power, blackness, and aesthetic practice. Building on this prior work, here Moten approaches sound variously as material, medium, metaphor, and method. The dialogue brings key concepts in sound studies—silence, repetition, voice, rhythm, and so on—into conversation with themes that have long animated Moten’s thought, such as refusal, excess, improvisation, and the Black radical tradition. Topics discussed include the palimpsestic nature of live performance; the metaphysics of voice; the sonic life of labor, racial capitalism, and settler-colonial displacement; Moten’s musical-poetic collaboration with Brandon López and Gerald Cleaver; and works by Édouard Glissant, M. NourbeSe Philip, John Coltrane, and W. E. B. Du Bois, among others.

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A review of Jules Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny (Verso Books, 2024).

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