As a new member of the SpokenWeb team, I was thrilled to connect with Postdoctoral Fellow and SpokenWeb researcher, Mathieu Aubin, and learn about his work in a more specific context than our weekly meetings. Aubin’s research examines queerness in oral histories and audio recordings of literary events, engaging activist and marginalized voices, content, and frequencies, through dynamically inclusive archival approach. Our conversation, which began with Aubin’s research on the queer, sonic resonances of the Sir George Williams Collection recordings, extended to broader questions of research praxis and the listening methodologies such work calls forth. This inspired reflection on my own positioning as an interviewer, documenter, and producer of a kind of archive itself: how to best represent the formal and casual registers, the central and sideline components, of our interview exchange? My conversation with Aubin was generative in that it oriented me towards numerous texts and historical moments, but also prompted reflection on the assumptions that are both brought to, and embedded within, archival collections more generally. In an effort to practice the kind of critical approaches to archival production and reception Aubin’s research takes up, this interview has been formatted to reflect the various registers and modes through which this archive, itself, emerged.

Sadie Barker
Wed, May 13, 10:28 AM
to Mathieu

Hi Mathieu,

I’m getting in touch regarding the symposium profiles (I figured I probably didn’t need to send you an official description!). But, to reiterate nonetheless: In lieu of the symposium this summer, I’d love to ask you some questions about your research…

Mathieu Aubin
Thu, May 14, 10:57 AM
to me

Hi Sadie,

Thank you for your email. Yes, I would be happy to have a generative discussion about the SGWU series recordings. Do you have a timeline in mind? I will likely have more time at the beginning of June to complete this interview.

Let me know!

Sadie Barker
Jun 13, 2020, 10:58 AM,
To Mathieu

Hi Mathieu,

An email interview sounds great! With that in mind, I’ll proceed with some questions….

What are you most excited about in your research right now? Are you working on a particular project?

At the moment, I’m working on several research projects related to LGBTQ2+ media, literary events, and small-press communities. Recently, I have been especially excited about my collaboration with SpokenWeb’s Felicity Tayler. This Spring, Felicity and I co-organized a series of events focusing on lesbian liberation media. In April 2020, we co-guided an invigorating SpokenWeb Listening Practice in which we listened to clips from the 1974 Media Mothers documentary about Vancouver’s Press Gang collective and the 1980 Labyris Rising film documenting Toronto’s lesbian community. Because of attendees’ interest in the clips, we decided to co-organize a virtual showcase of the full films with Constance Crompton, Michelle Shwartz, Rachel E. Beattie, and Raegan Swanson. After showing the films, we held a Q&A that included input from people who were part of the communities featured in the videos. Felicity and I are now talking about the possibility of turning this discussion into a podcast episode about lesbian liberation media, intergenerational activism, and community formation. We will hopefully have more on that soon!

Reading your article, ‘Reintroducing Tish’s Shitty Issues,’ I was struck by your insights into the relations between the dominant structures of the archive (or, in the case of earlier Tish publications, heteromasculine aesthetics and context) and interpretations of archive. Your discussion of ‘failure,’ particularly, made me reflect on the implicitly hierarchized ways of interpreting text, or hearing sound, and, how reading or listening outside of those embedded assumptions (as ‘Tish’s Shitty Issues’ seemed to do so effectively) opens up whole networks of  possibility. I’m interested to hear more about your approach to ‘the archive’ as a researcher and listener.

I have always found myself gravitating towards queer artifacts within sound and textual archives. I still remember reading bissett’s work for the first time in an archive at the end of my undergrad and being captivated by his approach to language and art. Given that I often found these queer artifacts in university and community archives, it is not surprising that my work has been informed by Kate Eichhorn’s research on the use of archives within ongoing feminist movements. Eichhorn says that the feminist archive can be “a site and practice integral to knowledge making, cultural production, and activism. The archive is where academic and activist work frequently converge” (4). In thwarting heterosexist hierarchies within knowledge production and the construction of social systems, activists have historically turned to the archive not only as a means of demonstrating that these histories exist but also as a means of advocating for one’s contemporary concerns and values. Part of what this entails for me is combining a queer listening of audio archives, such as SpokenWeb, to see what can be heard, activating the archive by engaging with the clips in podcasts and embedding them within blog posts to reach a wider public, and producing oral histories with people who were part of the recordings. In doing so, I am working on empowering LGBTQ2+ artists by bringing their earlier work into ongoing activist work and speaking with them today through oral history interviews because these ageing activists continue to make important contributions to current social movements.

Mathieu Aubin
Jun 15, 2020, 10:11 AM,
to me

Hi Sadie,

I especially like your curated questions. As you probably know, you do not always know who is reading your work, so it was a pleasure to read your questions about my article on Tish. Reading over your response to it, it makes me think about the overarching trajectory of my work and how I continue to ask myself those types of questions about the literary audio archive and queer media…

What are you listening to these days?

All of my life, music has filled my homes’ soundscapes. So I have always been listening to all kinds of music. More recently though, I have been taking a “research approach” to music by exploring the back catalogue of the Song Exploder podcast. In the podcast, the host Hrishikesh Hirway invites musicians to come on his show and “explode” their song by analyzing their different parts and explaining how the song came together. For instance, one of the episodes features the song “Awake” by Tycho, an artist that I enjoy very much. In listening along with Tycho to the song, you discover that, although most of his music has almost no vocals, each song has one vocal part. These episodes remind me of what we have been working on in the weekly “Listening Practices” as we listen alongside a guide who curates clips and points out different sonic resonances that we may have not previously noticed.

Sadie Barker
Jun 16, 2020, 5:01 PM
to Mathieu

Hi Mathieu,

Its great to hear your thoughts, and a bit more about your work and approach. I also know and love Tycho—now I’m going to listen for the one vocal! And, I’m going to check out Song Exploder…

Can you give a bit of a teaser for your planned paper for the conference? I know that your paper is taking up the queer resonances in the Sir George William’s Collection. Could you describe any particular recordings or moments that resonate, and what your approaches to that project have been?

In my approach to the Sir George Williams University Reading Series Collection, I am particularly interested in the public events’ relationships to key gay historical moments. In this presentation, I will be talking about how listening queerly to recordings featuring readings by lesbian and gay poets (e.g., bill bissett and Daphne Marlatt) and poets who read queerly-inflected work (e.g. Phyllis Webb) give insight into the ways that homosexuality was being publicly articulated prior to and just after the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1969. Listening queerly entails listening for sound affected by queerness, which is expressed through a person’s discussions of culture, intimacy, friendship, politics, and sexuality, as well as their tone, speed, volume, and silences when the poets read their work, introduce their poems, and interact with audience members. For instance, bissett’s October 31st, 1969 recording features a great poem entitled “another 100 warrants” that examines police surveillance, Phyllis Webb’s 1966 recording enables us to listen to her read her minimalist Sapphic poems from Naked Poems (1965), and an 1969 Allen Ginsberg reading includes him reading homoerotic poetry. By listening queerly to these recordings, I then ask, how did LGBTQ people articulate their queer experiences at these events?

Can you tell us about the audio sound clip you have chosen to present with your profile?

I have chosen to include an oral literary history interview between lesbian poet Daphne Marlatt and former SpokenWeb research assistant Ashley Clarkson. As an oral historian interested in queer sonic resonances in the Sir George Williams University Reading Series, I found Marlatt’s interview to be especially compelling because it provides her perspective on literary reading series during the 1960s-1980s. One of the most exciting moments in the interview is when Marlatt speaks about the feminist communities in Vancouver and Montreal and the role of bilingual feminist literary events such as the 1984 Women and Words Conference because it shows how different communities functioned and how major literary events brought them together.

Sadie Barker
Jun 16, 2020, 5:01 PM
to Mathieu

Hi Mathieu,

I’ve started listening to the Daphne Marlatt interview and am fully engrossed. Your point about the community connections really resonated. I’m in Vancouver now (it’s where I’m from) and I loved hearing Marlatt speak about the different feminist communities in each city—the “intellectually exploratory” Montrealers and the “social acute” Vancouverites…

I would be interested to hear about your work on queer listening practices. As a theory and praxis of reception, can you describe that methodology? You mention listening for ‘sound affected by queerness’ and mention both semantic and reduced approaches. Could you describe those experiences of listening?

I have been working on this question for my upcoming DH 2020 presentation so I am happy that you asked. Digital humanities scholars have deployed a variety of digital tools to analyze audio by marginalized communities (e.g., pitch analysis and sound visualization). However, critical race and sound studies scholar Nina Sun Eidsheim critiques the use of machine learning for engaging with people of colour’s voices, arguing that doing so reproduces racist assumptions of voice. Along the same critical line, I contend that the use of conventional digital sound analysis tools to analyze sound in bissett’s recordings would reproduce the essentialist stereotypes about gendered voice akin to those of the RCMP’s “fruit machine.” As an alternative approach, I suggest a qualitative listening methodology in which I listen for queer sonic resonances in bissett’s digitized recordings as well as new digital born oral literary history recordings that I produce with the poet. What I mean when I say “queer” is a term that reflects an identity marker for people who do not identify with heteronormative assumptions of gender and sexuality and when I say “sonic” I mean what is audible to the human ear. Informed by queer oral historian practices, listening for queer sonic resonances focuses on how bissett interprets and articulates his life through his poetry, uses queerly-coded language based on the event’s context, builds relationships with audiences through discussions of culture, intimacy, friendship, politics, and sexuality, and creates moments of dissonance through silences. To return to the poet’s subjectivity and let the poet speak in response to the archive that I am engaging with, I have conducted and recorded oral history interviews with bissett in which we discuss the earlier recordings’ personal and historical contexts and imagine how these new oral history recordings could provide new historical information by being placed in SpokenWeb’s digital archive. So far, my queer listening to bissett, for instance, has strived to activate the queer activist potential of SpokenWeb’s archive by imagining these recordings not as data to mine but rather as bodies of evidence of queer lived experiences that continue to resist the heteronormative status quo.

Sadie Barker
Jun 16, 2020, 5:01 PM
to Mathieu

Hi Mathieu,

Your point about the sonic processing/machine learning—how digitized or automated processing can reproduce essentialized perception— is so interesting. I think I often make the error of attributing (at least at a subconscious level) a kind of ‘neutrality,’ or, objectivity to these processes, which your response (and, working in processing now myself) has really made me reflect on.

Mathieu Aubin
Fri, Jun 19, 11:00 AM
to me

Hi Sadie,

I am happy to see that this project has brought out some shared interests.

Looking forward to seeing you in an hour!

Mathieu Aubin is a scholar on print and performance cultures in Canada. He completed his PhD at UBC and is now an Horizon Postdoctoral Fellow at Concordia University where he holds a leadership position within the “Oral Literary History” research component of the SpokenWeb project. As part of this project, he is working towards recuperating queer people’s contributions to Canadian literary culture. His work on queerness, literary communities, and Vancouver has been published in the journal Canadian Literature.

*

This article is published as part of the Listening, Sound, Agency Forum which presents profiles, interviews, and other materials featuring the research and interests of future participants in the 2021 SpokenWeb symposium. This series of articles provides a space for dialogical and multimedia exchange on topics from the fields of literature and sound studies, and serves as a prelude to the live conference.