Shana Goldin-Perschbacher, Temple University

“Stolen Song”: Appropriation, Essentialism, and Ownership in Transgender and Queer Country and Folk Music

It’s understandable that those from “a nothing town where they sing the same song in every house” would “try on” other peoples’ sounds, white transgender artist Rae Spoon sings in “Stolen Song”(2016), “but you can take it off and that’s why it doesn’t belong to you.” “Stolen Song” sets up identity as both artistic and as essentialist, demonstrating the conflicted space of cultural appropriation debates given theories of identity as socially constructed vs. inherent. This talk explores the history of folk and country musics' impacts on North Americans’ understanding of identity, and, more broadly, the questions of artistic sincerity in the context of Otherness, accusations of misrepresentation, and questions of national belonging.