Where Does Diversity Go Straight? Biopolitics, Queer of Color Critique, and Music Education

Abstract

Diversity discourses in music education have evolved from (white) liberalism of the 1990s that conceived difference in terms of dualisms such as insider/outsider to global neoliberalism currently in which sources of difference are interchangeable as long as the historicity of each remains occluded. In this way, so-called “diversity-relevant” groups, such as white queer people are positioned against non-white groups, straight or otherwise, in ways that support neoliberalism and contribute to violence against the latter. To ask where diversity goes straight assumes a place where it is not straight—if not exactly queer, with queer understood (in the context of race) as a “refusal to inherit” kinship relations in which queer(s) disappear(s). Whether conceived in terms of culture, race, (dis)ability, gender, and/or sexuality, diversity has become “all the rage” in music education and academic research generally. Theorizing diversity discourses in music education at their discursive limits, I argue that those limits are also where they also may be exceeded and demonstrate this through an example using queer of color critique to analyze interactions of sources of difference as a way to historicize and racialize “diversity” in music education.

Public scholarship in music education: Rethinking academic freedom by unthinking method

“…More than this, these gatekeepers almost exclusively represent hegemonic scholarly perspectives aligning with Western ontologies and epistemologies that delimit what knowledge is, how it is generated, and what (or who) it is for. Music education researchers may thus be seen to engage in “trafficking in diversity” discourses to accrue the necessary capital to be of relevance as public scholars, while (inadvertently) upholding “neoliberalism and contribut[ing] to state violence and antidemocratic ends” (Gould, 2021, p. 152). We might then ask: despite our work so often challenging the neoliberal, Eurocentric, heteronormative, colonial, classist, ableist, racialised, and gendered frames of teaching and learning music in many institutional and community settings, are we merely peppering our work with just enough critical theory to be “ de rigeur ” (Schmidt, 2021, p. 235) in a field where “diversity has become ‘all the rage’” (Gould, 2021, p. 151)?…”

“….] privileges” (Smith, 2013, p. 264; see also Gould, 2021; Mantie, 2022)? While published self-critique may chart processes of transformation as it lays bare “a fundamental reconstitution of ourselves” (Smith, 2013, p. 264), it may not do much more.…”