Branding Ailey

Through an ethnographic account of Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation (AADF), this article examines the tensions between the production and the liberation of the queer black male dancing body. Drawing from fieldwork conducted at the AADF during the summers of 2005, 2006, and 2008, it exposes the politics between on- and offstage performances of masculinity in two sites; the studio and the 2009 Ailey Gala. Within this context, space becomes an important framework for observing the internationally recognized branding of black male dancers for the AADF. Organizational culture, gender norms, and the policing of masculinity reveal strategies of the AADF in which traditional signifiers of (heterosexual) masculinity are emphasized, praised, and rewarded. Straying from this script not only risks suspicion and rejection within the presumed queer space of dance, but also reveals the narrow definitions of gender performance and expression allowed for black male dancers in the twenty-first century.

Intersectionality in Third-Wave Popular Music

This essay traces popular music’s relationship to third-wave feminism through the concept of intersectionality and situates the development of popular music and feminism in the larger political context of the 1990s and 2000s. Intersectionality forms a key discourse through which the members of the movement located themselves generationally, politically, and intellectually. At the same time, the third wave’s emphasis on intersectionality has not always translated into holistically intersectional practices. Despite the commitment to understanding that aspects of identity offer greater or lesser positions of power and influence, third-wave feminists have most often foregrounded the activities of white, middle-class musicians and sometimes ignored the contributions of women of color, from hip-hop feminists to pop musicians. This essay focuses on popular music’s relationship to the third wave in sexuality, race, and, class as they play out across mainstream pop, hip-hop, and alternative/indie rock music from the 1990s to the 2000s.

Generic Sequences and the Generic Tonnetz

This chapter employs concepts from diatonic set theory, transformation theory, and neo-Riemannian theory in an investigation of sequences in generic (mod-7) pitch space. Sequences may be described using generic transposition operators, mod-7 analogs of the more familiar mod-12 chromatic transposition operators, and may be mapped in a generic Tonnetz analogous to the Tonnetz diagrams of neo-Riemannian theory. A complete classification of generic sequences with two-chord transposition blocks is derived from the paths described by the sequences in the Tonnetz. While it is tempting to regard generic space as “diatonic,” the examples demonstrate that generic structure governs many sequences that are not actually diatonic at all. The examples also show that the sequences found in the literature include many more types than are widely recognized and that generic sequence structure may apply in numerous other contexts besides patterns of chord roots.