Street Queens: New Orleans Brass Bands and the Problem of Intersectionality

Abstract

The members of the all-female Original Pinettes Brass Band contest the male domination of the New Orleans brass band scene. Playing music on male-gendered instruments, they queer the normative relationship between instruments and musicians and carve out a space for female musicianship. This essay deconstructs their songs and performance decisions as agential and subjective sites of black feminist thought put into action to subvert the brass band patriarchy. The Pinettes force us to view the New Orleans brass band scene as an intersectional site where gender is a central element in the construction and consolidation of power relationships.

Global Musical Modernisms as Decolonial Method

“…58 The construct of musical traditions (including community-based popular music-making) as resistive (against Western music) is made even more complex in that their practitioners often are actually subverting particular social forces, justifying descriptions such as 'resistant black femininity', 59 'more than just resistantit's revolutionary'. 60 It goes without saying that ethnomusicology conducts invaluable research and plays an important role in the cultural sustainability of musical traditions. But the ethnomusicological resistance towards other kinds of music occludes other forms of decoloniality, a term which has become the central focal point in ethnomusicology in recent years.…”

High Notes In Hard Times: The Impact Of Ensemble Participation On The Well-Being Of 2SLGBTQ+ Musicians

“…Women are often discouraged from playing instruments stereotyped as male, which includes the entire brass family and drums. Women who play these instruments draw a lot of attention and it often makes others uncomfortable (DeCoste, 2017). Much like gay men's choruses were created to free gay men from stereotyping, all gender-marginalized brass bands can provide women and non-binary brass players a place to be free from gender norms in music.…”

“…These ensembles often have cisgender heterosexual women in them but creating a space for non-men to play stereotypically masculine instruments queers the gendered relationship many musicians have with their instruments (DeCoste, 2017).…”

#BrownGirlTakeover: Representing Queer Desi Female Artists in Virtual Spaces

“…The issue of gender roles presents itself as another common theme throughout this thesis and stems from issues of race and representation, as discussed above (Devitt 2013;Fanshel 2013;Peraino 2013;Schweig 2016;DeCoste 2017;Hansen & Hawkins 2018). In relation to Kyle DeCoste's ethnographic work dedicated to the allfemale New Orleans brass band, the Original Pinettes, DeCoste points out that the only available scholarship on brass bands focuses almost exclusively on race and how this particular music practice that originated from military culture, "became racially encoded as black" (DeCoste 2017: 182).…”

“…The cross-cultural phenomenon of gendering musical instruments and/or a music genre, as seen with male-dominated genres like heavy metal, hip hop, and remix culture (Fanshel 2013;Schweig 2016;DeCoste 2017;Hansen & Hawkins 2018), mirrors the social and legal principle of the 'one-drop rule' 12 in relation to gender and sexuality. DeCoste illuminates this line of inquiry by drawing upon the work of feminist jazz historian, Sherrie Tucker, who argues that women in all-female ensembles have historically been sexualized, especially those who play malegendered instruments 13 and thus, calls into question one's sexual orientation.…”