Jacob Kopcienski, PhD candidate in musicology at Ohio State, presents "Sounding Community Pride in the Mountains: LGBTQ Cultural Placemaking, Publics, and Activism in West Virginia." This lecture is co-sponsored by The Ohio State University Libraries.
What does Pride sound like in the Appalachian mountains? Through marches, parades and festivals since the early 1970s, Pride has become intimately associated with the music, aesthetics and culture of metropolitan LGBTQ communities and national visibility politics. As part of a recent wave of LGBTQ activism in rural regions, organizers in West Virginia have formed ten community pride organizations in small to mid-size towns since 2017. In addition to providing support and advocacy, these organizations use pride-themed cultural events to create affirming public space for LGBTQ community members and build coalitions with progressive allies.
This talk shows how community pride organizations in West Virginia use music and performance to engage rural visibility politics, cultural placemaking and activism. Archival materials and oral history interviews show how music and performance scenes mobilized LGBTQ communities to organize the first Pride in Charleston, West Virginia, in 1997. Turning to contemporary pride organizing, the speaker uses ethnographic research from 2019–2022 to examine the affordances and constraints on the public platforms community pride events create for LGBTQ musicians and performers. Artists’ performances are mobilized within networks of local participants to curate an affective sense of community pride from regional queer and trans performance scenes, slogans from regional progressive economic placemaking, and nationally mediated LGBTQ pride music. Listening to the reception of these events reveals how respectability politics and regional cultural conservatism constrain these performances. The talk demonstrates the productive practices by which community pride events contribute to local community building and coalitional activism in Appalachia.
Jacob Kopcienski (he/they) is a PhD candidate in Musicology with a GIS in folklore whose multifaceted work explores music, listening and community through writing, teaching, collaboration and community-engaged projects. Kopcienski's dissertation project Sounding Queer Appalachia uses ethnography, archival research and media analysis to examine how socio-musical activities mobilize LGBTQ communities, placemaking and intersectional activism in Appalachia. Kopcienski has also worked with the Ohio State Center for Folklore Studies and the Rendville Historic Preservation Society on a public humanities project documenting the history of the cemetery in Rendville, Ohio. Also an accomplished saxophonist and performing artist, Jacob Kopcienski is a staff writer for the website I Care if You Listen and was a part of the Ohio State Sonic Arts Ensemble’s collaborative composition/improvisation project Live from the Multiverse.
Lectures in Musicology is co-sponsored by The Ohio State University Libraries.
Lectures are held Mondays at 4 p.m. in the 18th Avenue Library, 175 W. 18th Ave. (Music/Dance Library, second floor, room 205). These events are free and open to the public. Campus visitors, please use either the Tuttle Park Place Garage or the Ohio Union South Garage. All other garages in the vicinity of the 18th Ave. Library are closed to visitors before 4 p.m.
All events are subject to change.