Beate Neumeier Books

This volume brings together twenty-one original essays by international scholars from the fields of gender studies, cultural theory, and music studies. Covering a wide range of music genres and theoretical perspectives, the shared concern of all contributions is the underlying concept of gender and sexuality pervading music production and performance as well as its consumption. At the end of the first decade of the new millennium, at a time when once abolished gender boundaries seem to be re-established under the guise of postfeminism, there is a discernible and renewed interest in rekindling the debate about the de- and reconstruction of dichotomies with regard to gender and music as well as with regard to its academic intersections in sociology, literary and cultural studies, musicology, and music theory. Through the shared focus on the interrelation of music and gender in theory and performance, the volume comprises such seemingly disparate categories as Classical and Pop music, Gangsta Rap and Liederspiel and thus contributes to the unsettling of established boundaries and points towards the continuity of important dialogues.

This volume presents inter- and transdisciplinary reflections on nature and environment in Australia in different but interrelated contexts at the intersection of the humanities and the social sciences. The wide scope of the volume includes contributions from anthropological (and ethnographic), historical, geographical (and urbanistic), as well as legal, linguistic, literary and media perspectives, highlighting the productive intersections between these different approaches. The overall goal is to show their inseparability in the concerted efforts to meet the environmental challenges of our time. The specific situation of Australia in the context of the current global environmental crisis is connected to the effects of climate change in relation to the post/colonial destruction of the ecological balance through interventions in fauna and flora and the exploitation of natural resources. The nexus between ecocide and genocide is thus at the core of Australian postcolonial ecocriticism, laying bare the links between and persistence of the ongoing histories of colonization, globalization and environmental destruction.