Imagining Something Else: A Queer Essay

Abstract

This queer essay is in three sections. In the first two sections I take two different flights over the realms of sense, terminology, speaking, in-bodyment, and materiality. In some of the moments of reading, I will be considering the potentially oppressive+anti-oppressive and the potentially tortuous+emancipatory. Underlying the written words and drawn images, I wonder how disciplinary queering of the scene reveals how people and things are inseparable.

No matter what my questioning verbal discourse may do, I am also reminded that SomeThings and SomeBodies also remain resilient and agential. I wish to show how I think it is actually im+materiality which does the queering towards which I increasingly feel called to attend and care. I consider how systematic disengagement from, and diffraction of dominant narrative mechanisms scream out for the perception of a multiplicity of ontological commitments: Could the capacities of what I call the ‘Queer Nervous non-System (QNn-S)’ emancipate the anthropocentric from the Central, Peripheral and Social Nervous Systems?

In the final third section, I introduce my thoughts about Materiality Inscription Analysis (MIA) aimed at how to perform reiterative flights and queering within music therapy research and practice. This is one way that I am advocating for the persistent study of the ontogeneology and ontogenesis of music therapy.

With this digitalized hand-written and drawn essay I wish a renewed unsettling of the becomings of music therapy, that it/they may be globally uniqued, may be temporary, and may be polymodally sensed. Somethings else, somethings more. Perhaps.