[-empyre-] love will steer the stars

[Ann Cvetkovich]

Hi all:

I’ve been following the conversation with interest – and although I haven’t been a member of the empyre conversations before – and don’t know Jennifer, who invited me to join, well (not yet anyway) – I feel at home in part because I have long-standing connections to Renate and Tim – and their work on sense/sensation – via Cornell, and that network of affiliations, also fostered here, will no doubt come up in my contributions this week.

Although I have things to say about each our keywords, especially intuition, I will start with the “dawning of the Age of Aquarius” because that phrase/song – is embedded inside me as somatic knowledge because of my deep love for the musical Hair in the 70s.  I was glad to see Renate post the lyrics and Tim reminisce so as to get that thread going.   As an impressionable teen, who was a bit too young for sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll, I nonetheless had access to the cast album which I played incessantly, enough so I knew all the lyrics by heart, even complicated ones like “sympathy and trust abounding” and “mystic crystal revelation and the mind’s true liberation.”  I saved my money to be able to see the stage production twice when the Broadway touring company came to Toronto, and I had an ecstatic experience of the live performances.

In later years, I was somewhat embarrassed that my utopian dreams of countercultures and protest came from pop culture – but the story of how Hair made the transition from subculture to the mainstream, through a downtown NY art world workshop process, is in fact an interesting one.  I’ve come to appreciate the power of the musical, through scholars such as my friend Stacy Wolf (Changed for Good), and through my students – whose access to queer culture through Rent … or to an antiracist vision of American culture through Hamilton .. through deep fandom have been instructive. (And then there’s Fun Home and songs like “Ring of Keys” as access to queer intuitions about gender and sexuality.)  In this context, I might argue that my early experiences of Hair were a technology of intuition, an alternative way of knowing that was implanted somatically and accessed through an intuitive process, one often sidelined by the main currents of my scholarly life.

I will have more to say about the Aquarius part of “the age of Aquarius” and ways that astrology and tarot have shaped my life and my thinking/feeling, including thinking about feeling, but I’ll leave it there for now.


Ann Cvetkovich (she/hers)
Director, Pauline Jewett Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies
Carleton University
Ottawa, Canada
Carleton University is located on unceded territory of the Algonquin peoples.

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