Editors' Introduction

Editors' Introduction

Journal of Popular Music Studies (2026) 38 (3): 1–3.

America is now in a moment—not its first—where backlash enjoys the full force of political authority. The lines between paramilitary and military, militia and police force, vigilante justice and the legal system, which enforce this backlash, are frighteningly blurry.

The architects and partisans of this moment’s backlash insist that it is merely a correction to a period of leftist or minoritarian overreach, the saturation of public life with (for example) Black people speaking about their right to be alive, women demanding bodily sovereignty, and gender non-conforming people claiming recognition. In nearly any political campaign at any scale during the past decade in the U.S. and elsewhere, the far right’s warrant for its radical platform has been the supposedly continuing need for this correction.

But was there ever such an overreach? As many have noted, the list of men whose careers were ultimately derailed by accusations of sexual misconduct is not especially long. Black Lives Matter protests and pedagogy briefly, partially reoriented institutions and public opinion. A vanishingly small number of trans people had broken through to broad media visibility by the mid-2010s. In reality, the powerful backlash of the past decade, the systematic dismantling of civil rights of all kinds, has been carried out against an imaginary overreach, not the fact of racial or gender revolutions but the fear of them.

The pattern has been the same in academic music studies. Departments of music in the U.S. and Europe remain anchored in (a particular historical imaginary of) the western classical tradition, and openly nervous about incursions of racially marked musical forms, or discussions of sex and gender of any kind, especially in major courses, whose whiteness and heteropatriarchy are shrouded by appeals to focus on “the music itself.”

These departments of music periodically convulse in a backlash against the putative overreach of ideas and aesthetics that suggest that race and gender matter to musical practice. Old canons are forcefully reasserted, interlopers attacked. But this backlash, just like the right-wing backlash that infests so much of the political world as we write this, is pitched against an imaginary overreach. Search your local library for recent work on hip-hop, electronic dance music, house ball, reggaeton, and so on. You will find that all of these remain quite marginal. Conservative music departments install conservative curricula, which require courses that in turn fuel publishing and hiring demands reflective of a white supremacist canon. The “popular music” overreach that these departments fear has never, in fact, arrived.

From the vantage point of the United Kingdom and Europe, it is increasingly difficult to read the current American moment as exceptional. The backlash against racial justice, gender plurality, migration, and public reckonings with historical inequality circulates transnationally. Across Europe, political movements gain traction by framing diversity, immigration, and multiculturalism as crises requiring correction. The result is a recurring pattern in which the mere visibility of marginalized communities is cast as evidence of excess.

Recent events have underscored this reality echoing the reverberations we experienced in the murder of George Floyd while in police custody. Here I say the name of Yves Sakila. The senseless death of a 37-year-old Congolese man in Dublin following security restraint has prompted renewed conversations about race, belonging, and state violence across Europe. As the legal and political distinctions between cases are unlayed (Do you mean “laid out”?), the public response to the events reminds us that Black life remains precarious in societies that often imagine themselves beyond the racial histories they critique elsewhere. The fantasy of overreach—whether attributed to migrants, racial minorities, women, queer communities, or other marginalized groups—continues to animate political projects whose actual effect is the narrowing of democratic possibility.

Academic institutions are not immune from these currents. Indeed, universities often understand themselves as spaces of openness and critical inquiry, yet they remain vulnerable to the same reactionary impulses that characterize the broader political landscape. The recurring anxiety that questions of race, gender, sexuality, migration, or coloniality have become too prominent frequently bears little relation to institutional reality. More often, such concerns emerge precisely when historically marginalized voices have achieved only limited visibility. The backlash is thus directed not at dominance but at the possibility of transformation.

And so it is with enormous pride that JPMS presents our new issue, composed of five pieces of extraordinary scholarship on queer musical topics. This is not a special issue, but rather an incidentally thematic one that resulted from having (happily) a lot of conceptually related work in our queue. These five pieces are in certain ways quite diverse, focusing for example on three different continents (Africa, Europe, North America). But all of them think through musical queerness in exciting ways, contributing ideas and approaches that, rest assured, will not happen enough this year. And we are even prouder to publish them against the right-wing tide currently rushing so powerfully in the United States and Europe, among other places.

Kelly Hoppenjans-Sanders’s “‘Doing Something Unholy’: Algorithmic Publics and Reclaiming LGBTQ+ Culture on #QueerTok” examines “#QueerTok,” an “algorithmic public” on TikTok whose mechanisms are imbued by users with a near-mystical status, and which has lately facilitated emerging forms of queer visibility. Hoppenjans examines how #QueerTok has, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic, played host to circulations of videos around which queer community has developed.

Adriel Miles’s “Declaration of a Beat: Ontic Rupture in Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Auntie Diaries’” takes on the immense challenge of unpacking the poetics and politics of a song that reflects on transness while using troubling language to describe gender alterity. Miles’s discussion of whether this language is transphobic, ironic, or something else entirely is nuanced rather than polemical. “Kendrick’s trickery,” Miles writes, “is rooted in the maintenance of a metatextual contradiction in his lyrics that cannot be reconciled within the track itself.”

Skyler Jones’s “Queens, Bitches, and Whores: David Bowie’s Queer Feminine Selves” examines Bowie’s “complicated embrace of femininity” largely through female characters in his lyrics. Jones examines sound, character, and narrative, as well as self-citation across Bowie’s catalogue. Methodologically, the piece thinks with Susan McClary, and through literary studies. “The typical reading of Bowie’s oeuvre as a linear progression of characters and genre signifiers obscures the ways that he constructs selfhood as not just fragmented and ever-changing, but necessarily and simultaneously plural—a plurality that includes multiple cohabiting feminine selves,” writes Jones. Understanding Bowie requires not only attention to change over time, and artistic elasticity, but also feminine self-identification, and ultimately a plurality of feminine selves.

Marco Roque de Freitas’s “‘It’s All Gay Music, Definitely’: Ethnographic Reflections on the Operationalization of the Concept of ‘Gay Music’ Within Lisbon Gay Nightlife” considers whether musical repertoire and sexuality might be linked, using the example of queer nightlife scenes in Lisbon as a case study. Articulating queer studies, theories of musical categorization and genre, and nightlife studies, this article traces how “gay music” has taken shape in the popular imagination as a semi-stable category. The piece additionally provides a kind of roadmap to queer music studies—as noted above, still a far smaller territory than one might expect or hope for.

Finally, Warrick Moses’s “’Feel Myself Coming Back Home:’ Queer Black Women as ‘Foreign Bodies’ in the Wake of Covid-19 “ asks what it meant to be a queer Black woman musician during the height of the pandemic. Focusing on South African musician Dope Saint Jude’s single “Home,” Moses asks the reader to “consider the notion of the Black diasporic queer woman’s body anew as an easily identifiable, easily scrutinized, and threatening ‘foreign body’ to the environments in which and to which it is (dis)placed.”

We’re proud to publish all five, now as much as ever.

Alisha Jones

Benjamin Tausig