Oh What a World: Constructing a Reparative
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“Oh What a World”: Queer Masculinities, the Musical Construction of a Reparative Cultural Historiography, and the Music of Rufus Wainwright A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Kevin C. Schwandt IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Kelley Harness November 2010 © 2010 Kevin C. Schwandt Acknowledgements Most importantly, I must thank my advisor, Dr. Kelley Harness. My transformation from passionate musician to passionate scholar has been, at times, frenetic and unwieldy. I am deeply grateful to have had a mentor who encouraged my energy while carefully directing it and insisting that I channel it in productive ways. Similarly, my committee, Dr. Peter Mercer-Taylor, Dr. Elaine Tyler May, and Dr. Sumanth Gopinath challenged me in ways that were provocative but, ultimately, deeply valuable. Dr. Anna Schultz, Dr. Gary Thomas, and the late Drs. Mirjana Lausevic and Donna Cardamone Jackson have all taught me the value of scholarship in pursuing both joy and justice. I have been blessed with a remarkable cohort of colleagues during my doctoral studies. Throughout the process, friends who understand the craziness, doubt, pride, and frustration of graduate education have surrounded me. I wish all graduate students could have such a quality support network. My dissertation came to being during a period of extreme personal tumult and I am exceptionally grateful for the support of my family and friends, who refused to allow things to fall apart and always put me back together when I became unhinged. Finally, I will never fully understand the grace with which Kareem has held me up during the emotionally exhausting culminating years of this process. Above all, he is the greatest blessing I have and I hope I can somehow repay his love. i Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to all LGBT people and allies—those I love, those who have inspired me, those with whom I argue, those I don’t know, and those who have not yet entered the community. We have no choice but to continuously and forcefully push toward social justice. This necessitates consciously taking time for joy, celebrating our beautiful histories, loving our dynamic and diverse community, and periodically repairing our often-battered selves and psyches. ii Abstract 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- iii 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. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES.................................................................................................................vii LIST OF MUSICAL EXAMPLES............................................................................................viii INTRODUCTION: “Light Reading”: Reparative Cultural Historiography and the Limits of Camp........................................................................................................1 CHAPTER ONE: “Oh What A World!” The Wizard of Oz, Queer Authority, and the Negotiation of Fantasy..........................................................................................22 “You Psycho Glitter Bitch!” Voice........................................................................31 “There’s No Place Like Home”: Geography, Movement, and Ethical Inversion.............................................................................................48 “ . Why, Then Oh Why Can’t I?” Home, Family, and Being Judy...................65 CHAPTER TWO: “For My Harp I Have Strung”: Orpheus and Queer Authority..........................................73 “I Always Believe You”: Opera Queens and Queer Identity................................78 Queer Orpheus.......................................................................................................86 “. I’ve come for to sing for him”: Rufus-as-Orpheus........................................91 CHAPTER THREE: “Get Me Through Grey Gardens Tonight”: The Politics of Queer Cultural Histories and the Revision of Cultural Memory.............................................................................100 “We Leave the Showtunes to Rufus”: The Politics of Queer Cultural Histories..............................................................104 Revisiting Grey Gardens......................................................................................123 Opening the Doors of a Green Grey Gardens......................................................138 v INTERLUDE: “She’s a Monster!”...........................................................................................................145 CHAPTER FOUR: “Schubert Bust My Brain”: Musical Cyborgs and Wainwright’s Queering of Art Song.............................................151 Franz Schubert and the Sexual Politics of Musical Biography and Reception..................................................................159 Cyborg Song: Piano/Voice Hybridity and the Stakes of Privileged Music Historical Narratives...................................170 “In Uniform”: Pianos, Domesticity, and Subjective Empowerment...................184 “Imaginary Love”: Rufus-as-Schubert................................................................194 CONCLUSION: “Do I Disappoint You?”...................................................................................................205 WORKS CITED...................................................................................................................208 vi List of Figures Figure 1. Opal Wheeler, Sybil Deucher, and Mary Greenwalt, cover of Franz Schubert and his Merry Friends.................................................160 vii List of Musical Examples Example 1. Rufus Wainwright, outline of the opening of “Oh What a World”................55 Example 2. Rufus Wainwright, “Grey Gardens,” Structural outline of opening period....................................................................125 Example 3. Rufus Wainwright, “Grey Gardens,” Outline of end of second verse: “Honey can you hear me . .”.......................... 136 Example 4. Franz Schubert, opening of “Geheimes,” adapted from Sergius Kagen, ed., “Geheimes,” in Schubert: 200 Songs in Three Volumes, vol. 1................................................158 Example 5. Franz Schubert, “Auf dem Flusse,” measures 5-8........................................196 Example 6. Franz Schubert, “Auf dem Flusse,” measures 41-49....................................196 Example 7. Rufus Wainwright, opening of “Pretty Things”...........................................202 Example 8. Rufus Wainwright, “Pretty Things,” initial statement of “B” section..........203 viii 1 INTRODUCTION “Light Reading”: Reparative Cultural Historiography and the Limits of Camp In a 2005 interview for The Advocate, openly gay singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright claimed to find himself alienated from mainstream images of gay men, finding a source of identification in an idealized figure from the past: I think that the majority of the gay press is quite bad and misleading to the intellectual and physical health of homosexuals. It betrays the historical legacy of brilliance that once existed in the gay world, of being the true guardians and keepers of intellectual and artistic brilliance. Gay people have upheld high art for years. Now, in the gay male press, there's