Introduction
But the question may be asked: Are not the kinds of phenomena that I have been discussing of interest precisely because they produce us as human beings with a certain kind of subjectivity? (Rose Reference Rose, du Gay, Evans and Redman2000, p. 320)
I've always had a problem with the average macho man – they've always been a threat to me. (Kurt Cobain Reference Cobain1998)
Much has been written over the past two decades about gender as a performative – a comportment and ideation that is citational and reiterative – a practice of subjectification that is agentic. As extensive as the work has been, it has almost exclusively been presupposed by an aural world of able bodies. While trans and intersex bodies are non-normative and have effectively destabilised identitarian politics (see, for instance, Halberstam Reference Halberstam2005) in what we may term ‘this wholly heterosexual world’,Footnote 1 their historically and contemporaneously conferred dis-ease is popularly and medically configured within psychiatric and psycho-social disorders outside the popular imaginary of ‘disability’.Footnote 2 While the writings and politics of performativity have done much to deconstruct and decentre the white, male and middle-class corporeal ideal, there still remains, as James Clifford has argued, the need for close readings and persistent interrogation of the ways in which ‘human beings become agents’ (Clifford Reference Clifford, Hall, Gilroy, Grossberg and McRobbie2000, p. 103). To this repeated analysis we would especially argue in favour of attention being levelled at what ‘precedes and conditions’ identity conferral and subversion (Butler Reference Butler1993, p. 226). More specifically, we would argue in favour of attention to the ways that masculinity is performatively produced through the play of music. This is because musical performance on the bass guitar affects and effects different conceptualisations and knowings of masculinity, hearing and hearing disability. It is the agency – the active participation and labour of young men and music – that we explore.
The article draws us into the world of ‘Shane’, a twenty-two year old man who was born and raised in the working-class suburbs of metropolitan South Australia. Shane is white and identifies as heterosexual and working class. He has a moderate hearing disability in his right ear and a severe hearing disability in his left ear. He also has a mild speech impairment. Shane wears a hearing aid in each ear and uses spoken English as a primary mode of communication. Problems with hearing and speech limit his opportunities to valorise a masculine positioning in everyday spoken encounters. By contrast, the play of music on bass guitar incites and facilitates a diversity of communications and masculine meanings.
This article is about Shane's experiences of playing music on the bass, and his amazing capacity to, in his terms, ‘speak with sound’. Shane says that music is a sensation that is not necessarily comprehended with the ears but created and interpreted with and through the body. To have what he calls a ‘natural ear for music’ and ‘to pick up music by ear and improvise songs on the bass guitar’ requires a heightened embodied sensibility that he says many hearing people do not possess. Shane is the leader of an intra-generic heavy metal punk rock band where he says all the male members listen to his advice. Shane plays the bass in a band that covers tracks from bands including Nirvana, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam, Sound Garden, Jane's Addiction, Green Day and Foo Fighters. As will be shown, Shane's play of music performs a subversion of disabled identity containment, and a distancing from his experience of being Othered as a ‘hearing-disabled’ man in spoken exchanges.
The article builds on Judith Butler's notion of performativity to analyse Shane's interview. Performativity refers to ‘the reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates … [and] the simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings … who form the constitutive outside of the domain of the subject’ (1993, 2). Butler's notion of performativity will be used to give insight into the ways that disability is fundamental to the cultivation of masculinity through modes of performance. These performances, however, are not always already visual – the significance of Shane's story lies in its capacity to show the power of affect in the stylisation of different modes of embodied masculinity through the play of popular music on bass guitar. Masculine consolidation through interactions with others is dependent on the reiterated compliance of the body to visible, audible and tactile norms of conduct. In this way, Shane's interview will demonstrate the affect and sensory capacity that is routinely, laboriously and intently deployed in the cultivation of identity. It will show how culturally exalted performances of masculinity in interactive space may be rendered an ‘abject’ or Othered performance in another space or context. The ruptures and breakages inherent in the experience of masculine identification across interactive sites prevent disabled and masculine identity from being assured as ontologically given property of any subject.
Methods
The data discussed within this article emerge from doctoral research that explored the question of how young men with moderate to profound hearing disabilities, who communicate primarily in spoken English, construct their masculine embodied subjectivities in different spaces and locales of their everyday worlds (see Loeser Reference Loeser2005). The research was partially motivated by a close reading of the burgeoning social and disability studies literatures that explore the intersections and/or political dynamics of hearing disability, deafness and cultural Deafness, young men's experiences of growing up in Deaf families, and the monographs written by young Deaf men and women. It was identified that there was a paucity of social and cultural analyses that explored how young men with moderate to profound hearing disabilities, who communicate primarily in spoken English, constructed their masculine embodied subjectivities in the everyday social.
The empirical data were collected by means of exploratory in-depth semi-structured face-to-face interviews and online interviews conducted through e-mail. All interviews were conducted in the year 2000. Interviews sought the participants' reflections on six themes, these being social interaction, friendships and personal relationships, sport, education, employment and manhood. The same interview schedule was used for both interviewing methods. In total, nineteen men responded via e-mail and phone messages to the call for volunteers to participate in the research. With the exception of six participants, the young men had responded to a poster advertisement and letter of invitation sent out to the mailing list clientele of a South Australian service provider for people with hearing disabilities. A poster advertisement placed in a national newspaper yielded three participants. One participant responded to a poster advertisement placed in a local newspaper circulated in the Riverland region of South Australia. A colleague provided the name of a male friend with a hearing disability. One participant was a personal associate.
Of the nineteen formal interviews conducted, sixteen of these were tape-recorded face-to-face interviews which lasted ninety minutes to three hours in duration. Fourteen of the participants requested that they would like a copy of the final interview transcript. The two online interviews were conducted by sending one section of the interview schedule at a time until all six sections were completed. The online interviews lasted one month and four months in duration. One participant chose to be interviewed by written mail but withdrew from the research after completing the first section of the interview due to time and work commitments. Follow-up interviews were conducted with five participants by telephone and two by e-mail. The follow-up interviews were conducted four to ten weeks after the original interview and lasted ten minutes to thirty minutes in duration. Two of the participants requested a copy of the follow-up interview transcript.
Informants for the research were men aged eighteen to thirty-three years who had a moderate to profound bilateral or unilateral hearing disability and lived in metropolitan or rural locations of Australia. Men with moderate to profound or unilateral hearing disability were specified as potential subjects for the research study because of the degree of difficulty associated with oral interaction described within these classifications of hearing disability. Eleven had speech impairments. Most of the men identified as heterosexual, one participant identified as bisexual, and two did not speak about their sexual identities in the interviews. With the exception of two men who identified as Italian-Australian and Vietnamese-Australian, the interviewees were primarily white Westerners. All participants used spoken English as their main form of everyday communication. Young men who use sign language as a major component of their everyday interactive encounters were not interviewed. This is despite three of the men being fluent in sign language and their participation in some activities in their local Deaf communities. The world in which the participants live, with the exception of the three men who identified as members of their local Deaf communities, is largely devoid of a sense of community that involves ongoing interactions with other young people with a hearing disability.
Of the nineteen young men who participated in the study, nine spoke of the importance of music in their lives. The young men's discussions about music ranged from their experiences listening to music on the radio and on CDs, going to see live bands at pubs, clubs and music festivals such as the Big Day Out, dancing at raves, and playing a musical instrument. One young man spoke about work as a DJ, a job that ended much to his disappointment when he lost all of his hearing in his early twenties. Another young man spoke of his experiences organising a rave event in metropolitan South Australia. Fragments of the story of ‘Shane’ are selected for this article because they are indicative of the complexities, contradictions and ambiguities involved in the construction of hearing-disabled masculinities through interactive settings including band culture and different music cultures and sub-cultures that are reflected in all of the participants' stories. Shane chose the option of a face-to-face interview and also participated in a follow-up interview. His story is representative of a common research finding, that is, music can affect and effect different conceptualisations and knowings of masculinity, hearing and hearing disability for young men with hearing disabilities.
Shane's Story
Shane was raised by his mother and father in a working-class suburb in metropolitan South Australia. To understand the significance of music as a vehicle for conversation and masculine representation, it is important to begin by emphasising how Shane's relationship with his father shaped the techniques by which he has learnt to interact and converse with other males.
The sport of go-karting is the initial vehicle by which Shane, at nine years of age, establishes a relationship with his father that overcomes his difficulties communicating with ‘words’. The age of nine has particular significance for Shane. He says, ‘that's when I realised my hearing was bad’. He then remarks:
Shane: When you're really young speech is simple and you don't have any problems communicating with other kids but later in primary school the speech gets more complex and that's where the problems for hearing and speaking start.
Shane's account of the way he has learnt to relate to his father is an instance of an incitement to adopt a certain mode of relating established through a sporting practice. Go-karting functions to publicly affirm specific masculine practices and values, and up to the age of fourteen Shane shared that enthusiasm with his father, ‘because that's what he wanted me to do’. Gender scholar Ian Harris writes that fathers ‘pass on to their offspring codes of conduct’ (Harris Reference Harris1995, p. 24) and ‘provide standards of masculinity by which boys can judge the world’ as well as themselves (ibid., p. 27). Shane's participation becomes the condition in which his gendered corporeality is socially and discursively produced. Of importance to this discursive production is how Shane sees the forcible imposition of this activity by his father as a technique to ensure relational conformity to his gendered expectations and desires. Shane's insistence and privileging of different masculine behaviours and values disrupts the continuity of this gendered style of relating. His decision to withdraw from the competitive sport of go-karting results in a gap in conversation with his father.
The significance of the gendered dimension of ‘being tough’ is highlighted further when Shane's father calls him a ‘sissie’. In this relational context, the criteria for conversing with his father is imbricated in Shane's performance of a public form of heteronormative masculinity that is divorced from the ‘passive’, ‘fearful’ and ‘weak’ feminine. Resistance to this gendered style of relating results in Shane's experience of social exclusion. Butler (Reference Butler1990, p. 133) suggests that the repudiation of bodies for their sex or gender is an ‘expulsion’ that occurs through acts of exclusion or domination that consolidate culturally hegemonic identities and their outside ‘Other’. Shane later seeks to rectify the social exclusion and rejection he experiences:
Shane: Because Dad and me always did stuff together which was more activity based I felt I had to find something else I was good at so we had something to talk about again. He was better than Mum with understanding my problems with hearing people talk and I'm pretty sure, I reckon he deliberately helped me out of my shell when I found, I find it hard to hear talking by finding activities we could share together. Ones that didn't need a lot of words.
Shane says that he ‘had’ to find another way to relate to his father through a practical-based activity he is ‘good at’. A shared activity that Shane ‘is good at’ is crucial to ongoing social exchange and gendered acceptability. Shane goes on to describe how he came to use music as forum to (re)establish conversational exchange and interconnection. The play of music on bass guitar generates an imaginary coherence with the ‘acceptable’ masculine behaviours of his father who also played guitar in a band as an adolescent:
Shane: My dad played the guitar when he was young so I've sort of always wanted to have a go so I bought one of his guitars … Bass is easier because its got bigger, thicker strings and you don't have to do high frequency notes … I've got a natural ear for music and I'm able to pick up music by ear and put it on the guitar without needing to learn music written on paper and so it makes it quicker for me to learn stuff. Dad had his old guitar from when he used to be in a band so we started spending time every night playing old rock and roll songs together and he would help me with different chords. We didn't need to talk when we played together because I reckon the music was how we listened, sort of connected to each other. Cause I was good at it like dad said I could improvise and we found another way to relate by being musically in sync.
For Butler, studies of gender must consider the apparatus of production through which masculinities and femininities are established. Shane's masculine identity is the effect of a certain repetition of the enactment of ‘competent’ musical performance. Shane's desire to reacquaint himself with his father can be conceptualised as an act of retelling and aligning himself with his father's adolescent masculine way of being.
A capacity to hear the sound of the bass acts as a powerful validation of Shane's communicative and gendered credibility as it enables him to ‘learn’ to play ‘in sync’ with his father. The embodied vibrations of the bass affect his experiential reality to ‘have’ a ‘natural ear for music’ and ‘to be able to pick up music by ear’. Shane's ability to distinguish different music sounds by way of how they vibrate through his body enables his intimate knowledge of the guitar strings and chords as well as his ability to produce an infinite variety of sounds. It is by way of the translation of physical sensation to the manipulation of the guitar that Shane's aesthetic judgement of his performance is grounded.
Later in the interview, Shane draws attention to the difficulties he experiences interacting in verbal encounters with other people. He indicates that these difficulties have a gendered dimension. This is evident when he speaks of the specific communicative techniques he employs to hear other men:
Shane: Really if I'm out at a party and I don't know a group of people I won't say anything. I just keep my mouth shut, then there's more chance of me not saying anything stupid or saying something that doesn't mix in with what they're talking about that's not normal. Well, [others need to] be able to talk clearly to me and have face contact and often in a big group of people I haven't got time to whip my head around and see who said what and lip read in time to know what they said … its pretty embarrassing, unless you walk right up to them and ask them what they said, like then they might think your going to take them out or something. You have to watch the guys they are like that.
Shane's everyday experience of the verbal exchange, illustrated with specific reference to communicative encounters with strangers, is confounded by silence and a withdrawal from space. His fear of ‘saying something stupid’ attests to the risk of social devaluation through a somatic non-compliance to the expected dynamics of conversational flow. A necessity to get ‘close up to lip read’ people violates the bodily distancing required for ‘normal’ conversational interaction. Close facial proximity is symbolised as desire to fight or ‘take them [the guys] out’. To this extent, violence works as a mechanism for regulating the normative parameters of gendered interaction. The threat of violence instantiates in Shane a knowledge that his style of relating is divergent, undesirable and abject.
The forced situational passivity Shane experiences in verbal encounters initiates his desire to construct new forms of sociability and masculinity elsewhere. From his experience of learning to play the bass guitar with his father, Shane goes on to form what he terms an all-male ‘heavy metal punk rock band’ that performs at local concerts, parties and at friends' homes. In the following excerpt, he elaborates on the reasons for pursing the genre of alternative rock music as performed by bands including Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Red Hot Chilli Peppers:
Shane: That style of band were right up in the charts then … I never really listened to the radio because I couldn't really hear it so I found out about them [the bands] through friends who told me about them and lent me their albums. I really liked the style and dad brought me up with rock and roll music and, um, so I always liked that style and the power and melody of it. Cobain and [Eddie] Vedder were good at writing melodies even though they were really basic they were all the same kind of style which made it easier to play, like Red Hot Chili Peppers too. And there were a lot of low sounds and bar chords which were easy to hear. We [Shane and the band members] were all smoking a lot of hooch back then too which made the songs feel even more powerful, heavy when we played them, heard them. So we played music that we loved which was popular amongst most young people anyway so that's why so many people came to hear us play.
Shane goes on to contrast the significance of the bass as communicative strategy with the ongoing difficulties of spoken engagement that he encounters in the everyday verbal exchange. He talks about how the material reverberations of sound perform an interpellation of language and meaning into a gendered style of communication that itself institutes the production of asymmetrical oppositions between ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’. In Shane's band, a performative capacity to ‘feel sound’ and thus ‘hear’ it, is the criterion by which the band member's hearing capacity, and masculinity, are judged. Building a masculine identity, or acquiring the ability to secure positions in masculine discourse, is given impetus through a process of shaming:
Shane: [I]n the band I got started by advertising in the paper there weren't much communication problems then. When we weren't playing music the other players would get frustrated at me cause I couldn't hear what they were saying. But when I played the guitar it was the other way round and all the guys I have ever played with admired me and listened to my advice. If they couldn't cut it because they don't feel it … and play like a fairy boy I had to let them go so we never seem to have many band members for long. Those people, they don't have the art. The feel makes the performance perfect. You've still got to hear it obviously but its more the feelingfulness, yeah, when you and the guitar become one. That's why it got pretty annoying … when you've got a song and they can't pick it up cause they can't hear it, can't feel it, so they don't know how to sound good.
In the context of the band's social relations, the repeated enactment of standards of viable communicative clarity is enshrined in an embodied sensibility that is ‘able’ to ‘hear’ sound. This vocabulary offers Shane a culturally exalted masculine status within the band's gender hierarchy. Shane is explicit that in establishing his heightened capacity to make the guitar ‘speak with sound’ through years of practice and training, its significance as object is ascribed by its appropriation as translative of a language. Shane says ‘when I played the guitar … all the guys I have ever played with admired me’. ‘Admiration’ operates as a crystallisation of the masculine quest for recognition through public displays of prowess, being in this case, a technical mastery of the bass and an acute ear for music. This quest unfolds within a system of social antagonisms that register Shane's corporeal experience of being ‘hearing disabled’ in verbal exchanges.
The playing of the guitar is a means by which Shane re-stages his masculine status away from the subordinate position he occupies in verbal social exchanges. The point is the prowess and others' acknowledgements of it. It is interesting, however, that the gendered dynamics of musical performance in the band work to reproduce the masculine discourses that exclude and subordinate Shane's gendered status in oral conversation. Shane replicates the abuse and marginalisation his father directed at him when he did not fulfil the requirements of ‘tough driving’ by abusing specific band members with recourse to the sexist slander of ‘fairy boy’. Any association with the characteristics and expectations associated with the feminine are reiterated as undesirable, unworthy and abject Other.
These targets of abuse, who Shane says ‘can't cut it because they don't feel it … and they play like a fairy boy’ are transient members who are expelled from the band at Shane's command. Shane's aesthetic judgement (‘this doesn't sound good’) is necessarily an ethical judgement (‘you do not know how to be good’) as the quality of rhythmic relationships constitutes a perceived quality of social life and ‘appropriate’ and ‘inappropriate’ masculinities. The statement ‘not good’ is a means to mark not only a poor quality of sound, but also the failure of the expected capacity of the young men to possess this ‘art of hearing’. What this affirms are the complexities and contradictions of Shane's masculine identity as it is constituted within the gendered matrix of power he is compelled to both reiterate and oppose. While the gendered meanings taken up in these performative productions are part of hegemonic, misogynist and homophobic culture, they are, following Butler, ‘denaturalized and mobilized through their recontextualization’ (Butler 1990, p. 138), thus denying hegemonic culture of its claim to coherent gender and disabled identities.
Covering masculinity: the significance of alternative rock
The story that we have thus far outlined is that of Shane where Shane's personal narrative illustrates music as integral to identity formation and its inseparability from a masculinity symbolically and materially denied through an ‘imperfect’ body. His story indicates that hearing impairment can be a corporeal imperfection that is often only visible to those who also similarly embody a hearing disability or are closely familiar with those that do. This means that Shane labours between the visual surface, the cues of otherness that the visual surface might mask or deliberately or inadvertently signal, his interior world, and the imagined interior worlds of others. Shane's visually engaged narrative also demonstrates that he seeks a masculine and heterosexual identity as and in spaces of ambivalence. Still further he seeks a masculinity with a difference, yet a masculinity still firmly within the boundaries of a legible heterosexual masculinity.
Cues and clues to the intensity of this visual labour exist in Shane's music preferences and practice and revealingly in cover versions. Shane's band plays covers of songs by alternative rock bands that have had mass air-play on both mainstream and alternative radio stations at a multi-national level. Cover bands traditionally draw crowds in local live music venues. However, bands that do covers have lowered status as they are not viewed as ‘authentic’ bands. Yet bands playing covers provide band members and audiences alike with the opportunity to participate in different subcultures. This admixture of music preference and practice is both metaphoric and material for Shane, mirroring and refracting deep streams of pleasure and connection.
Without wanting to overstate either preference or practice, it is, we believe, worth taking some time to consider the visual aspects of the bands and CDs that provide Shane with a rich site of engaging with his identity. Indeed, during the interview Shane pulled two CDs from his collection when talking about the bands and albums he favoured. The albums were Red Hot Chili Peppers' Mother's Milk (1989) and Nirvana's In Utero (1993). The covers of these two albums provide another stratum to the visual place and play of music in Shane's affective and material engagement with identity. The packaging of the visual imagery of an album is a marketing tool that brands and sells. Nirvana and Red Hot Chili Peppers are iconic bands associated with in-your-face statement and non-conformity.
Within the alternative music genre, the imagery on Mother's Milk and In Utero spoke to the times in which they were produced. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, increasing attention was being given to masculinity and resistant, non-normative forms of music. Alternative rock, at least with Nirvana, challenged normative masculinity. Kurt Cobain, band leader, is infamously known for statements about being gay as a heterosexual man. At the crude end of analysis it could be said that Cobain maintained the power and privileges of normative masculinity, yet the claim he made of himself puts him at odds with the robust and homophobic end of heterosexuality.
The cover of Nirvana's album In Utero entails an extended montage and visual play on masculinity through women's bodies. The central and front image is a porcelain-like figure, reminiscent of Sandro Botticelli's 1484 painting Birth of Venus. The naked woman has angel wings. Internal organs, such as the bowel, skeleton, muscles, veins and arteries are in part exposed. Under the exposed internal muscle structure of the body are two breasts, patterned like brains in a vine-like tattooing. Inside the insert and among a series of other images there is a male body, at least judging by its head features and body shape, yet it is pregnant, with one half of the stomach exposing a baby in utero. While there are many possible readings of these images, at the very least they illustrate an ambivalence about bodies and masculinities that are imbricated in femininities. While the body is held open for inspection and introspection, and in some sense the normative body is in question, there is no immediate surface reading of the disabled body. Yet, the difference and ambivalence marked by images and stylisation of the masculinities of the bands, and band members, certainly open the space for Others to conjoin and affiliate with the movement from the normative to the non-normative. The images accompanying In Utero underscore the band's reputation as reckless, smash and trash.
The image on the cover of Mother's Milk (1989) is a photographic head and torso of a young naked woman whose head is tilted with eyes downcast, resembling a Madonna pose. Her left nipple is covered by a semi-open red rose and in her crossed arms she holds the band members who are supplicant to her. A figure is draped across the palm of the woman's hand partly under her thumb and nestled into the crook of her arm – it is a figure draped like the male body in Jacques-Lois David's 1793 painting The Death of Marat. The image on the back of the CD insert is a montage including a large elephant which occupies the background in the left. The elephant has a long trunk and large tusks that connote power, dominance and the phallus. Two of the band members hold their left arms at right angles, flexing their muscles, yet they wear white Y-fronts before Calvin Klein elevated the Y-front to the status of sexual icon. To their right is the band leader, Anthony Kiedis. In contrast to his fellow band members, Keidis is wearing boxer shorts and has his cheek blown out as if stifling laughter – perhaps an ironic reference to the absurdity of all that is behind him. Underpants, Y-fronts, boxer's, trunks – men exposed on the back cover, yet ambiguously nurtured on the front.
In some ways then, it is of no surprise that these bands are a source of pleasure, inspiration and respite for bodies and identifications that are invisible in prevailing popular culture imagery and ideation. The two bands whose music Shane covers persistently twist and bend the normative male body. It is perhaps theatre and the wilful troubling of the male body that holds open an ‘in-between’ access to other forms of being which do not sever all ties with the normative.
The ambivalence and openness of the male body in music and the specific instances that Shane is inspired by, occur through visuality and through sound. Indeed, the bands, their visual practices and their music can be read to provide a space of difference and one that can be as loudly sounded as it is possible to endure. The very strength of the sound is a distortion and in turn makes space for distorted and altered sound. It is where the conventions of sound can be acceptably eschewed with an eschewing that is not only pleasurable but releases sound to open interpretation. What we are also suggesting, therefore, is not merely that people with hearing disabilities ‘feel’ the music, perhaps or perhaps not more acutely than others, but that sound as a medium of expression and as a space of possibility may be as significant as any other aspect of music to people with hearing disabilities.
At every turn, however, the parody and critique of these bands maintain the centrality of both white heterosexuality and an able body. Yet there is much in them that speaks beyond either the blue- or white-collar masculinity – both of which are reductive typifications of masculine ‘bread winning’ but which continue to figure strongly and especially so for young men aspiring to mediate their working-class origins. It does well to remember at this juncture that people with disabilities are over-represented in low-paid jobs and poor working conditions. Shane has struggled with employment and the struggle has been directly related to his hearing (see Loeser Reference Loeser, Pearce and Muller2002, Reference Loeser2005; Loeser and Crowley Reference Loeser, Crowley, Bollen, Kiernander and Parr2006).
Both Nirvana and Red Hot Chili Peppers ply an excess in which it is possible to suggest that masculinity is central as well as in some sense failed. This failed yet retrievable masculinity sits alongside Nirvana's ironic name as a playful melancholia at once exceeding the real and mundane while invoking an almost morose sensibility. In contrast to this are the Red Hot Chili Peppers, whose playfulness is happy in an ecstatic, power-charged and goofy way. Dick Hebdige suggested of the early sub-cultural punk movement that while it included ‘horror circus antics’, it also ‘eloquently condemned’ a ‘divided and unequal society’ (Hebdige Reference Hebdige1979, p. 115). The visual imagery and display as well as the lyrics of the music of the bands that Shane covers certainly comment on a divided and unequal society.
As a concept, ‘cover’ ranges in meaning from wrapping and swathing, through concealing and obscuring to shielding and protecting. Cover bands may well be hiding a lack of musical initiative and creativity, but equally they may be read as honouring and promoting a critical, resistant and collective action that rejects the strictures of normative embodiment and persona. Jodie Taylor describes ‘… music as a non-literal signifier and as a space in which identity can be realised and performed’ (Taylor 2007, p. 3). Still further she notes that, ‘Music effectively mediates identity and provides a space for one to negotiate their identity in relation to social power structures, and music is especially important in doing this when social discourse fails’ (ibid., pp. 3–4).
Judith Halberstam and others have argued that masculinity tends to manifest as non-performative. The question of authenticity in identity has since taken on particular meanings in the discourses of gender as masculinities (Connell Reference Connell1987, Reference Connell1995, Reference Connell2000; Whitehead and Barrett Reference Whitehead and Barnett2001), sexualities (Buchbinder Reference Buchbinder1994, Reference Buchbinder1998; Epstein 1994; Mac an Ghaill Reference Mac an Ghaill1994; Yang Reference Yang1997; Petersen Reference Petersen1998), race (Riggs Reference Riggs1989; Mercer Reference Mercer1994; Dyer Reference Dyer1997; Stecopoulos and Uebel Reference Stecopoulos and Uebel1997; Riggs Reference Riggs2006) and non-normative masculinities (Halberstam Reference Halberstam1998). Here we would argue that while Shane's story illuminates the extreme labour involved in the making of masculinity, especially if read in sociological terms, his affiliation with and affirmation of covers, and particularly with bands such as the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Nirvana, are both ironic and multiply non-contradictory. The cover of the cover, that uncovers and recovers, inheres the ascendancy of a resisting masculinity, one in which the display of its artifice and creative possibility are inseparable from what precedes or conditions it. It is the ampersand, the and, that provides source and sustenance of possibility, being neither one thing nor its absolute other.
Summary
Shane's interview shows masculinity as a (per)formative production where musical performance affects and effects different conceptualisations and knowings of masculinity, hearing and hearing disability. The performance of music, by way of familiarising oneself with the different sound vibrations of the chords of the guitar and the notes, forms the structures in which Shane's masculine conduct comes to be appropriated and defined by him and others. In the moment where Shane ‘talks’ by way of musical sounds in the genres of rock and roll and alternative rock, his hearing disability melts away into the matrix of playing. The playing of the bass guitar and the sound it produces act as a discourse mobilised for the purpose of confirming social belonging and ‘insider status’ through the production of masculine meanings that can be understood and heard. The fact that rock music as masculine discourse privileges the ‘feelingfulness’ of sound as the language in which a desirable masculinity is created illustrates the convergence between forms of masculinity and tactility. Music as auricular materiality provides a central means through which Shane navigates the gendered interactive world and his relationship to it.
Feminist musicologist Susan McClary claims that ‘music does not just passively reflect society; it also serves as a public forum within which various models of gender organisation (along with other aspects of social life) are asserted, adopted, contested and negotiated’ (McClary Reference McClary1991, p. 8). Shane's story illustrates the ambiguous convergence and redistribution between hearing disabled and gendered identities across and within different contexts of social interaction. The constricted structure of opportunity for self-assertion and the abject status he occupies in the verbal exchange makes the pursuit of music appear an arena in which Shane can be judged solely on his own merit.
These contradictions and contestations that occur in specific spaces of interactive engagement reinforce an argument that masculine and hearing-disabled identifications are always fractured and experienced differently across intersecting and antagonistic practices and positions. These identities are not contained and static but fluid and exchangeable, permeable and unstable, excessive and transgressive. Although the gendered meanings taken up across sites are part of hegemonic, misogynist and homophobic culture, they are, following Butler, ‘denaturalized and mobilized through their recontextualization’ (Butler 1990, p. 138), ‘a re-enactment and re-experiencing of a set of meanings constituted in time, and instituted in … space’ (ibid., p. 140). Masculinity is consolidated through reiterated performances that are not ‘natural’ or ‘self-evident’, but rather contingent on the perceptions and sensory interpretations of self and others.
Acknowledgements
To Sam and Rachel: for the love and labour of hearing with a difference.
