Shana Goldin-Perschbacher
• B.M.A., Viola Performance, University of Michigan, 2001
• M.A. and Ph.D., Critical and Comparative Studies in Music, University of Virginia, 2008
Shana Goldin-Perschbacher is a specialist in interdisciplinary popular music studies and identity studies. Motivated by musical articulations of self and community, her work on contemporary sonic, visual, and social media takes shape through critical, ethnographic, analytical, and historical methods. Her book Queer Country, published by the University of Illinois Press in 2022, examines transgender and queer performances of country and Americana music through explorations of sincerity, genre trouble, journey, rurality, misrepresentation, masking, and collaboration. Queer Country was winner of the U.S. chapter of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music's Woody Guthrie Award for an author's first book and was recognized with a Certificate of Merit for the 2023 Association for Recorded Sound Collections’ Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research in Recorded Country, Folk, Roots, or World Music. It was also deemed one of the best books about music published in 2022 by Variety, Pitchfork, No Depression, The Boot, and Ticketmaster. Her essay, “TransAmericana: Gender, Genre, and Journey,” was commissioned for a special issue of New Literary History and won the 2016 Marcia Herndon Award from the Society for Ethnomusicology.
She has also published on Meshell Ndegeocello in Popular Music, on Björk in Women and Music, on a variety of subjects in The Grove Dictionary of American Music, on Jeff Buckley in Oh Boy!: Masculinities and Popular Music, on ani difranco in the Journal for the Society for American Music, and on queer country in the Oxford Handbook of Queerness and Music. She presents research and contributes to activities at meetings of several professional organizations, including including the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, the American Musicological Society, the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Society for American Music, the Pop Conference, Feminist Theory and Music, the American Studies Association, and the Trans Studies Conference.
At Temple University, Prof. Goldin-Perschbacher teaches courses for music majors, non-majors, and graduate students in popular, folk, and classical music, interdisciplinary music methodologies, critical theory (especially engaging issues of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class in relation to music and culture), and other topics.
Prior to joining the faculty at Temple, Goldin-Perschbacher was queer studies postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, the postdoctoral fellow in music in the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities at Stanford, and a lecturer in LGBT Studies at Yale University. She graduated from the first class of Ph.D. students in Critical and Comparative Studies in Music at the University of Virginia where her dissertation was supported by an American Association of University Women fellowship. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan she studied viola performance, English literature, and visual art.
• M.A. and Ph.D., Critical and Comparative Studies in Music, University of Virginia, 2008
Shana Goldin-Perschbacher is a specialist in interdisciplinary popular music studies and identity studies. Motivated by musical articulations of self and community, her work on contemporary sonic, visual, and social media takes shape through critical, ethnographic, analytical, and historical methods. Her book Queer Country, published by the University of Illinois Press in 2022, examines transgender and queer performances of country and Americana music through explorations of sincerity, genre trouble, journey, rurality, misrepresentation, masking, and collaboration. Queer Country was winner of the U.S. chapter of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music's Woody Guthrie Award for an author's first book and was recognized with a Certificate of Merit for the 2023 Association for Recorded Sound Collections’ Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research in Recorded Country, Folk, Roots, or World Music. It was also deemed one of the best books about music published in 2022 by Variety, Pitchfork, No Depression, The Boot, and Ticketmaster. Her essay, “TransAmericana: Gender, Genre, and Journey,” was commissioned for a special issue of New Literary History and won the 2016 Marcia Herndon Award from the Society for Ethnomusicology.
She has also published on Meshell Ndegeocello in Popular Music, on Björk in Women and Music, on a variety of subjects in The Grove Dictionary of American Music, on Jeff Buckley in Oh Boy!: Masculinities and Popular Music, on ani difranco in the Journal for the Society for American Music, and on queer country in the Oxford Handbook of Queerness and Music. She presents research and contributes to activities at meetings of several professional organizations, including including the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, the American Musicological Society, the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Society for American Music, the Pop Conference, Feminist Theory and Music, the American Studies Association, and the Trans Studies Conference.
At Temple University, Prof. Goldin-Perschbacher teaches courses for music majors, non-majors, and graduate students in popular, folk, and classical music, interdisciplinary music methodologies, critical theory (especially engaging issues of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class in relation to music and culture), and other topics.
Prior to joining the faculty at Temple, Goldin-Perschbacher was queer studies postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, the postdoctoral fellow in music in the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities at Stanford, and a lecturer in LGBT Studies at Yale University. She graduated from the first class of Ph.D. students in Critical and Comparative Studies in Music at the University of Virginia where her dissertation was supported by an American Association of University Women fellowship. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan she studied viola performance, English literature, and visual art.
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Detailed and one-of-a-kind, Queer Country reinterprets country and Americana music through the lives and work of artists forced to the margins of the genre's history.
Publication supported by a grant from the AMS 75 PAYS Fund of the American Musicological Society, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Winner, Woody Guthrie First Book Award, International Association for the Study of Popular Music-US Branch (IASPM-US), 2024
A Pitchfork Best Music Book of 2022
A No Depression Most Memorable Music Book of 2022
A Variety Best Music Book of 2022
A Boot Best Music Book of 2022
A Ticketmaster Best Music Book of 2022
A Happy Magazine Best Music Book of 2022
Certificate of Merit, Best Historical Research in Country, Folk, Roots or World Music. category, 2023 ARSC Awards for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research, 2023
Papers
Musicians discussed: Rae Spoon, Joe Stevens/Coyote Grace, Namoli Brennet, Tylan Greenstein/Girlyman, Actor Slash Model
As star musical guest at the 2004 Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony, she exposed the international audience to Iceland’s feminist nationalist imagery in a message of peace. Embodying Nordic scholar Eiríkur Magnússon’s 1864 nationalist icon “Iceland as a Mountain Woman,” Björk became Mother Ocean, uniting countries and athletes as stemming from one source, a metaphor made almost material through her dress, which unfurled as she sang, enveloping the entire field of athletes. Icelandic feminism developed simultaneously with the move for national independence (begun in the late 18th century and eventually achieved in 1944), through an embrace of traditional gender symbolism that made space for maternal perspectives in sovereign, ethical governance. However, Björk’s Olympics message utilized this legacy not to invest in nationalism but to perform peaceful world unity as a feminist reaction to the aftermath of 9/11/01.
Her performance draws on a gender difference model unpopular with contemporary critical theory but informed by both Icelandic feminism’s challenging relationship with nationalism as well as the body-politics of the American Vietnam War-era counterculture. I use this context to analyze Björk’s avant-garde a capella album Medúlla (2004), which contains her Olympic song “Oceania” as well as two songs “Pleasure is All Mine” and “Mouth’s Cradle” ground-breaking for their sensual maternalist aesthetic, which map out a nuanced politics of peace to challenge both terrorism and counter-terrorism. Themes of motherhood, terror, and mortality are further developed in her subsequent work, the protest album Volta (2007), which features an array of instrumental collaborators (questionably) symbolizing the artist’s sense of humans as “one tribe.” A collaboration with Malian kora virtuoso Toumani Diabate, “Hope,” explores the troubling Western media reactions to a pregnant Palestinian suicide bomber.
Often misunderstood as an elf-like outsider to human experience or a hysterical extension of Iceland’s dramatic landscape, Björk is musically exploring difficult concepts of nationalism, difference feminism, and multiculturalism to address the most challenging and important questions of our time – the significance of identity and the future of humankind in a culture of war.
Detailed and one-of-a-kind, Queer Country reinterprets country and Americana music through the lives and work of artists forced to the margins of the genre's history.
Publication supported by a grant from the AMS 75 PAYS Fund of the American Musicological Society, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Winner, Woody Guthrie First Book Award, International Association for the Study of Popular Music-US Branch (IASPM-US), 2024
A Pitchfork Best Music Book of 2022
A No Depression Most Memorable Music Book of 2022
A Variety Best Music Book of 2022
A Boot Best Music Book of 2022
A Ticketmaster Best Music Book of 2022
A Happy Magazine Best Music Book of 2022
Certificate of Merit, Best Historical Research in Country, Folk, Roots or World Music. category, 2023 ARSC Awards for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research, 2023
Musicians discussed: Rae Spoon, Joe Stevens/Coyote Grace, Namoli Brennet, Tylan Greenstein/Girlyman, Actor Slash Model
As star musical guest at the 2004 Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony, she exposed the international audience to Iceland’s feminist nationalist imagery in a message of peace. Embodying Nordic scholar Eiríkur Magnússon’s 1864 nationalist icon “Iceland as a Mountain Woman,” Björk became Mother Ocean, uniting countries and athletes as stemming from one source, a metaphor made almost material through her dress, which unfurled as she sang, enveloping the entire field of athletes. Icelandic feminism developed simultaneously with the move for national independence (begun in the late 18th century and eventually achieved in 1944), through an embrace of traditional gender symbolism that made space for maternal perspectives in sovereign, ethical governance. However, Björk’s Olympics message utilized this legacy not to invest in nationalism but to perform peaceful world unity as a feminist reaction to the aftermath of 9/11/01.
Her performance draws on a gender difference model unpopular with contemporary critical theory but informed by both Icelandic feminism’s challenging relationship with nationalism as well as the body-politics of the American Vietnam War-era counterculture. I use this context to analyze Björk’s avant-garde a capella album Medúlla (2004), which contains her Olympic song “Oceania” as well as two songs “Pleasure is All Mine” and “Mouth’s Cradle” ground-breaking for their sensual maternalist aesthetic, which map out a nuanced politics of peace to challenge both terrorism and counter-terrorism. Themes of motherhood, terror, and mortality are further developed in her subsequent work, the protest album Volta (2007), which features an array of instrumental collaborators (questionably) symbolizing the artist’s sense of humans as “one tribe.” A collaboration with Malian kora virtuoso Toumani Diabate, “Hope,” explores the troubling Western media reactions to a pregnant Palestinian suicide bomber.
Often misunderstood as an elf-like outsider to human experience or a hysterical extension of Iceland’s dramatic landscape, Björk is musically exploring difficult concepts of nationalism, difference feminism, and multiculturalism to address the most challenging and important questions of our time – the significance of identity and the future of humankind in a culture of war.