Constructions of Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Bound Sheet Music Collections

Abstract

This thesis examines constructions of gender, race, and sexuality in sixteen bound sheet music collections (binder’s volumes) held in the Jacklin Bolton Stopp Collection on Nineteenth-Century Music at the University of Maryland’s Special Collections in the Performing Arts. I provide a literature review and overview of relevant theoretical and methodological frameworks; address the importance of extrafamilial and intergenerational relationships in binder’s volumes, as well as memorialization and playfulness, all under the auspices of gender; examine constructions of race as exemplified through these books’ inclusion of blackface minstrelsy and songs linked to abolitionism; and detail constructions of both homosexuality and heterosexuality through music selection and biographical details. Drawing on feminist, speculative historical, microhistorical, and archival methodologies, I argue that bound sheet music collections provided opportunities for girls and young women both to subvert and affirm the white supremacist heteropatriarchal expectations of the nineteenth-century United States. This thesis contributes to literature on amateur music-making and, more specifically, binder’s volumes, expanding current scholarship by introducing speculative history and queer theory to this subfield.