Epistemology of the Curtain: Sex, Sound, and Solidarity in Singin' in the Rain and Sorry to Bother You

In: Cultural critique, Volume 121, Issue 1, p. 1-41

Abstract

Abstract: Singin' in the Rain (Donen and Kelly, 1952) and Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley, 2018) carry a common thread: one (mostly) enacts and the other subverts the "epistemology of the curtain." The curtain, iconic to sound studies' acousmatic sound objects, is a figure of forensic knowing, but Sorry queers it, decentering Singin 's curtained couples with a crowd and highlighting, maybe even repairing, the raced dance theft that Carol Clover first traced in Singin '. Harlem's Black Hoofers of early twentieth-century dance, usually unremunerated and uncredited, return with a vengeance in Sorry as the equisapiens that Cash Green first encounters in a men's room. Where Schaeffer named Pythagoras as a figure for sound studies, the queered curtain of sound studies might call, rather, for Pan.