Close Careful Trans Listening: Pauline Oliveros, Joe McPhee and Rachel Pollack's Unquenchable Fire

I read this paper—“Close Careful Trans Listening: Pauline Oliveros, Joe McPhee, and Rachel Pollack’s Unquenchable Fire”—on June 3, 2017 at the Montreal colloquium for the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation: Still Listening—A Series of Events in Memory of Pauline Oliveros. For me, it represents a first foray into an intersectional social aesthetics, drawing together transgender writing—in particular, Pollack’s speculative fiction—with queer theory and the practice of deep listening. As I point out, the paper leans a little toward Oliveros, despite the composition and recording being principally credited to Joe McPhee. I also need to develop more fully and carefully a reading of the theology of annunciation and its relationship to gendered bodies and the dynamics of consent and the discursive power of the speech act.

You might also want to check out Still Listening, the on-line exhibition of a series of 85 85-second compositions dedicated to Pauline Oliveros.

Oh, and if you want a copy of the music, you can buy it from Joe McPhee's Bandcamp page, here.