oa Feeling Un/Comfortable: Positionality and Embodied Experience in Classical Music Research

In this chapter we reflect on our work as Western classical musicians and White women doing research on music, gender, and racialization in a Finnish context. In conversations around Finland issues of race and colonialism are often overlooked. In classical music whiteness is constructed through aesthetics, ideals, music theory, repertoire, approaches to listening, and music education. As researcher-musicians we seek to challenge norms related to gender and race. Activist repair-work is about diversification of repertoire, but also about awareness of how spaces become White and how embodied experiences affect social experience. We explore the positionalities this produces. We situate ourselves in many ‘in-betweens’ of self/other, and insider/outsider and discuss embodied experiences and uneasy feelings. We suggest that experiences of comfort and discomfort can guide us to become aware of systems of inclusion and exclusion, and they can be operationalized to be used as an analytical tool for understanding positionality.

Keywords: affect theory ; antiracism ; embodied awareness ; feminist musicology ; orientation ; racialization ; researcher-musician ; situated knowledge ; uneasy feelings ; whiteness