Sounding Kin: A Queer-Feminist Thinking of Free Improvisation

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Tomlinson, Vanessa

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Kallio, Alexis A

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2021-11-16
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Abstract

This artistic research is an emergent, situated thinking of freely improvised musicking through the lens of queer and feminist theory. It pursues a post-qualitative inquiry founded in collaboratively thinking-with a series of companions: myself as an artist and as a queer feminist, my musicking and thinking communities, six conversation companions, and six companion texts. Along with these companion-thinkers, I explore three entangled points of inquiry: “unmastering” the habits of institutional musicking and the persistent presence of the master-Man; interrogating the notion of “freedom” in free improvisation, its history and its situated meaning for a queer-feminist white settler musicker on stolen, unceded Aboriginal land; and the possibilities of collaboration founded in notions of contamination, interdependence, changing and being changed. Thinking-with companions and with musicking is explored as a curious and iterative practice, with voices and ideas arising recurrently throughout the text. Free improvisation is a generative site for soundmaking as kinmaking—musickin: intimacy formed via contact and exchange. The sweaty concept of “free”, however, becomes a prompt to reckon with complicity. By staying with this trouble, the queer-feminist free improviser practices response-able musicking in contaminated human and more-than-human collaborations.

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Thesis (PhD Doctorate)

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Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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Queensland Conservatorium

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The author owns the copyright in this thesis, unless stated otherwise.

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Subject

unmastering

freedom

history

queer-feminist

musicking

feminist theory

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