Craig Jennex
Dr. Craig Jennex is an Assistant Professor of English at Toronto Metropolitan University and a scholar of LGBTQ2+ history, performance, and politics in Canada. His broad program of research explores queer archival collections and methods, LGBTQ2+ memory and historicism, and contemporary creative practices that reanimate and challenge narratives of queer pasts.
Dr. Jennex is the co-author (with Nisha Eswaran) of Out North: An Archive of Queer Activism and Kinship in Canada (Figure 1 Publishing 2020). This award-winning book reproduces and contextualizes diverse materials from The ArQuives’ vast collection to tell the story of LGBTQ2+ history in Canada for broad audiences. Since its publication in 2020, Out North has become the definitive book on LGBTQ2+ histories in Canada: it is used as a textbook in undergraduate and graduate courses at Dalhousie University, the University of Toronto, McMaster University, and the University of British Columbia, among others; it has been featured in local, national, and international media; it won an award from the Alcuin Society for Excellence in Book Design in Canada and was named by OutTV as the most important book on queer history published in 2020. While currently available in English, Braille, and audiobook formats, a French edition of Out North will be available worldwide in August 2023.
Dr. Jennex is co-editor (with Susan Fast) of Popular Music and the Politics of Hope: Queer and Feminist Interventions (Routledge 2019) and co-editor (with Charity Marsh and Line Grénier) of a special issue of MUSICultures on the topic of “Queer Musicking.” His work has been published in Popular Music and Society, GUTS: A Canadian Feminist Magazine, The Spaces and Places of Canadian Popular Culture, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, the Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music and Gender, and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge’s Lingering broadsheet, among others.
His forthcoming book—Liberation on the Dance Floor: Popular Music and the Promise of Plurality in Early Lesbian and Gay Organizing—will be published by Cambridge University Press in early 2024. A corresponding public exhibition showcasing histories of LGBTQ2+ dance in the 1970s and 1980s will be hosted at Hart House at the University of Toronto in October 2023.
Dr. Jennex is an award-winning teacher and mentor. In 2022, he was awarded TMU’s Teaching Innovation and Inclusion Award for undergraduate and graduate-level instruction. Before joining the Department of English at TMU, Dr. Jennex taught at McMaster University, where he received the McMaster Students’ Union Award of Excellence in Teaching, Dalhousie University, the University of Regina, and Wilfrid Laurier University.
Supervisors: Susan Fast, Christina Baade, Amber Dean, Jacqueline Warwick, and Charity Marsh
Dr. Jennex is the co-author (with Nisha Eswaran) of Out North: An Archive of Queer Activism and Kinship in Canada (Figure 1 Publishing 2020). This award-winning book reproduces and contextualizes diverse materials from The ArQuives’ vast collection to tell the story of LGBTQ2+ history in Canada for broad audiences. Since its publication in 2020, Out North has become the definitive book on LGBTQ2+ histories in Canada: it is used as a textbook in undergraduate and graduate courses at Dalhousie University, the University of Toronto, McMaster University, and the University of British Columbia, among others; it has been featured in local, national, and international media; it won an award from the Alcuin Society for Excellence in Book Design in Canada and was named by OutTV as the most important book on queer history published in 2020. While currently available in English, Braille, and audiobook formats, a French edition of Out North will be available worldwide in August 2023.
Dr. Jennex is co-editor (with Susan Fast) of Popular Music and the Politics of Hope: Queer and Feminist Interventions (Routledge 2019) and co-editor (with Charity Marsh and Line Grénier) of a special issue of MUSICultures on the topic of “Queer Musicking.” His work has been published in Popular Music and Society, GUTS: A Canadian Feminist Magazine, The Spaces and Places of Canadian Popular Culture, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, the Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music and Gender, and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge’s Lingering broadsheet, among others.
His forthcoming book—Liberation on the Dance Floor: Popular Music and the Promise of Plurality in Early Lesbian and Gay Organizing—will be published by Cambridge University Press in early 2024. A corresponding public exhibition showcasing histories of LGBTQ2+ dance in the 1970s and 1980s will be hosted at Hart House at the University of Toronto in October 2023.
Dr. Jennex is an award-winning teacher and mentor. In 2022, he was awarded TMU’s Teaching Innovation and Inclusion Award for undergraduate and graduate-level instruction. Before joining the Department of English at TMU, Dr. Jennex taught at McMaster University, where he received the McMaster Students’ Union Award of Excellence in Teaching, Dalhousie University, the University of Regina, and Wilfrid Laurier University.
Supervisors: Susan Fast, Christina Baade, Amber Dean, Jacqueline Warwick, and Charity Marsh
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Publications by Craig Jennex
Such requests underscore that many queer people of color consider participation in music cultures to be vital to recognizing themselves as part of a larger community. To be sure, bodies listening and moving together on the dance floor can be evidence of queer lives and queer power. Historically, underground dance venues are spaces where queers can explore ideas of identity and community (see, for example, Fikentscher, Lawrence, Echols, Dyer).
BLM’s requests, then, seem to fit into the broader theme of the parade, in which participants honored the victims murdered at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando by carrying placards bearing the names and ages of victims and halting at 3PM to observe a moment of silence in their memory.
Unfortunately, public reactions to BLM’s demands suggest that music spaces in which queer people of color gather are understood as inconsequential to larger projects of LGBTQ politics—and that many Canadians still think of gayness as necessarily coupled with whiteness. Sue-Ann Levy, of the National Post, argued that this year’s parade was “in memory of the victims of the Orlando massacre” not “allowing one loud group to make a political statement.”
Published responses, which ignore the intersection of race and sexuality and reify the hegemonic whiteness of LGBTQ narratives, are unsurprising given that these BLM activists comprise part of a long lineage of queer activists of color who have been erased from the stories we tell about LGBTQ politics. In fact, many attendees and participants at Toronto Pride may have been unaware of the fact that most people killed at Pulse were racialized Latinx queers.
What is lost in this discourse is that BLM’s protest is precisely what the massacre at Pulse requires of us: to make an aggressive stand for spaces in which queer people of color can amass as a collective under the pulsing rhythms of dance music and to recognize the political potential of such gatherings.
And as music scholars we must also teach the erroneousness of claims that these spaces can ever be disconnected from the social politics articulated by people of color.
The affective charge of queer collectivity is regularly predicated on black and latinx musical traditions and forms of social dance that come out of communities of color. Moments of togetherness on the dance floors at Toronto Pride 2016 were undeniably made possible by the labor, traditions, and genealogies of black and brown bodies. This should alter our understanding of these pasts, change how we conceptualize LGBTQ experience in the present, and enable more just collective visions for the future.
Queer music scholarship must lead this initiative and teach, widely and voraciously, how to hear these politics.
Dans cet article, j'analyse les reprises de la chanson « Insensitive », le plus sou-vent associée à Jann Arden, par Rae Spoon, Vivek Shraya et Kaleb Roberston (Ms. Fluffy Soufflé). Les nouvelles versions de la chanson par Spoon, Shraya et Soufflé brisent essentiellement la progression linéaire temporelle – très fortement associée à certaines personnalités queer canadiennes –, car la reprise comme procédé musical est en soi un retour et, car certains détails des oeuvres rejoignent ce thème. Je montre que certaines expériences auditives renferment un potentiel politique : celui d'ouvrir des expériences temporelles alternatives. Leur projet collectif rend audible simultanément une généalogie musicale inattendue et encourage les audi-trices et auditeurs à tirer un sens de pluralité queer dans un contexte national d'individualisme grandissant. Leur reprise de « Insensitive » fait par ailleurs mon-tre d'une certaine virtuosité musicale quand la voix est libérée des strictes normes genrées hétéronormatives pour transformer une chanson mieux connue comme complainte solo en hymne queer.
Since uploading a rendition of Wham!’s hit song “Freedom” to YouTube in September 2009, Canadian singer/songwriter Lucas Silveira – lead singer of Toronto-based rock band The Cliks – has regularly posted solo cover performances on the video sharing platform. While cover songs are ubiquitous on YouTube, Silveira’s are extraordinary, chronicling his gender transition and the effects of the hormone testosterone on his voice and body. Silveira began posting covers in response to fan requests; comment sections of his YouTube videos, where a thriving international fan community amassed, quickly became a space in which fans pleaded for Silveira to cover specific songs, artists, or genres. So too did this online forum enable an overtly pedagogical project, as fans asked Silveira specific questions about the administration of testosterone and the effect the hormone has on transmasculine vocal performers. That his archive interested trans singers is not surprising; Silveira’s broad oeuvre of covers—recorded and posted from September 2009 to November 2013—allows us to listen closely to otherwise ephemeral sonic markers of gender transitions: voice breaks, subtle changes in pitch and timbre, among others. Silveira’s online cover project presents a voice in process.
Article on Toronto's bathhouse raids, the political response, and the sense of plurality therein, published in the new and awesome GUTS: A Canadian Feminist Magazine. Available here: http://gutsmagazine.ca/slider/no-shit
Volume ! by Craig Jennex
Upcoming Talks by Craig Jennex
Such requests underscore that many queer people of color consider participation in music cultures to be vital to recognizing themselves as part of a larger community. To be sure, bodies listening and moving together on the dance floor can be evidence of queer lives and queer power. Historically, underground dance venues are spaces where queers can explore ideas of identity and community (see, for example, Fikentscher, Lawrence, Echols, Dyer).
BLM’s requests, then, seem to fit into the broader theme of the parade, in which participants honored the victims murdered at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando by carrying placards bearing the names and ages of victims and halting at 3PM to observe a moment of silence in their memory.
Unfortunately, public reactions to BLM’s demands suggest that music spaces in which queer people of color gather are understood as inconsequential to larger projects of LGBTQ politics—and that many Canadians still think of gayness as necessarily coupled with whiteness. Sue-Ann Levy, of the National Post, argued that this year’s parade was “in memory of the victims of the Orlando massacre” not “allowing one loud group to make a political statement.”
Published responses, which ignore the intersection of race and sexuality and reify the hegemonic whiteness of LGBTQ narratives, are unsurprising given that these BLM activists comprise part of a long lineage of queer activists of color who have been erased from the stories we tell about LGBTQ politics. In fact, many attendees and participants at Toronto Pride may have been unaware of the fact that most people killed at Pulse were racialized Latinx queers.
What is lost in this discourse is that BLM’s protest is precisely what the massacre at Pulse requires of us: to make an aggressive stand for spaces in which queer people of color can amass as a collective under the pulsing rhythms of dance music and to recognize the political potential of such gatherings.
And as music scholars we must also teach the erroneousness of claims that these spaces can ever be disconnected from the social politics articulated by people of color.
The affective charge of queer collectivity is regularly predicated on black and latinx musical traditions and forms of social dance that come out of communities of color. Moments of togetherness on the dance floors at Toronto Pride 2016 were undeniably made possible by the labor, traditions, and genealogies of black and brown bodies. This should alter our understanding of these pasts, change how we conceptualize LGBTQ experience in the present, and enable more just collective visions for the future.
Queer music scholarship must lead this initiative and teach, widely and voraciously, how to hear these politics.
Dans cet article, j'analyse les reprises de la chanson « Insensitive », le plus sou-vent associée à Jann Arden, par Rae Spoon, Vivek Shraya et Kaleb Roberston (Ms. Fluffy Soufflé). Les nouvelles versions de la chanson par Spoon, Shraya et Soufflé brisent essentiellement la progression linéaire temporelle – très fortement associée à certaines personnalités queer canadiennes –, car la reprise comme procédé musical est en soi un retour et, car certains détails des oeuvres rejoignent ce thème. Je montre que certaines expériences auditives renferment un potentiel politique : celui d'ouvrir des expériences temporelles alternatives. Leur projet collectif rend audible simultanément une généalogie musicale inattendue et encourage les audi-trices et auditeurs à tirer un sens de pluralité queer dans un contexte national d'individualisme grandissant. Leur reprise de « Insensitive » fait par ailleurs mon-tre d'une certaine virtuosité musicale quand la voix est libérée des strictes normes genrées hétéronormatives pour transformer une chanson mieux connue comme complainte solo en hymne queer.
Since uploading a rendition of Wham!’s hit song “Freedom” to YouTube in September 2009, Canadian singer/songwriter Lucas Silveira – lead singer of Toronto-based rock band The Cliks – has regularly posted solo cover performances on the video sharing platform. While cover songs are ubiquitous on YouTube, Silveira’s are extraordinary, chronicling his gender transition and the effects of the hormone testosterone on his voice and body. Silveira began posting covers in response to fan requests; comment sections of his YouTube videos, where a thriving international fan community amassed, quickly became a space in which fans pleaded for Silveira to cover specific songs, artists, or genres. So too did this online forum enable an overtly pedagogical project, as fans asked Silveira specific questions about the administration of testosterone and the effect the hormone has on transmasculine vocal performers. That his archive interested trans singers is not surprising; Silveira’s broad oeuvre of covers—recorded and posted from September 2009 to November 2013—allows us to listen closely to otherwise ephemeral sonic markers of gender transitions: voice breaks, subtle changes in pitch and timbre, among others. Silveira’s online cover project presents a voice in process.
Article on Toronto's bathhouse raids, the political response, and the sense of plurality therein, published in the new and awesome GUTS: A Canadian Feminist Magazine. Available here: http://gutsmagazine.ca/slider/no-shit