Drowning Out the Noise: Private Listening, Public Spatialities, Queer Wellbeing

How does music listening in headphones function as an extension of the queer self in the public sphere? In what ways does this music support, exhibit, or conceal the presentation of gender and sexuality in these heteronormative publics? Awarded the 2022 Frederick Niecks Essay Prize and exhibited at Northwestern University in 2023, this project explores the extent to which this private listening adds to or alters the physical presentation of an individual and supports the action of existing queer in public spatialities, through the lens of Goffman’s “Territories of the Self (1971).” Methodologically, this work experiments with queer sonic ethnography through the dissemination of 18 sections of audio from six Go-Along interviews, a methodology developed by Kusenbach in “Street Phenomenology: The Go-Along as Ethnographic Research Tool (2003).” I aim to answer Steven Feld’s 2014 imagination of “an anthropology in sound” and to build upon Rooke’s 2009 writings on queering ethnographic research, particularly in its methods. I present this work as a report of an experiment in queer sonic ethnography, in the hope that it may further research into the public and private lives of queer individuals and provide a deeper insight into the street soundscape of the queer everyday.