Bio
Nadine Hubbs is a professor of women’s studies and music and faculty associate in American culture, as well as director of the Lesbian-Gay-Queer Research Initiative (LGQRI). Her research focuses on gender and queer studies, 20th- and 21st-century U.S. culture, and social class in popular and classical music. Her writings have treated topics including Leonard Bernstein, tonal modernism, 1970s disco, Morrissey, Radiohead, and country music. Hubbs’s award-winning first book, The Queer Composition of America’s Sound, asks how a circle of gay composers around Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson managed to become architects of American identity during the nation’s most homophobic period. Her latest book, Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, combines musicological, social, and historical perspectives on American country music to historicize and challenge current constructions of the working-class homophobe. She teaches women’s studies courses on gender, LGBTQ, and class studies, and on gender and sexuality in popular music.
Education
“The Promised Land: Springsteen’s Epic Heterosexuality, Late Capitalism, and Prospects for Queer Life,” in Bruce Springsteen: Essays on Rhetoric, Memorial, and Contemporary Culture, ed. William I. Wolff (New York: Routledge, 2016).
“Gender Deviance and Class Rebellion in ‘Redneck Woman’” (rev. ed., reprinted from Southern Cultures), in Country Boys and Redneck Women: New Essays in Gender and Country Music, ed. Diane Pecknold and Kristine M. McCusker (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016): 231-54.
“‘Jolene,’ Genre, and the Everyday Homoerotics of Country Music: Dolly Parton’s Loving Address of the Other Woman,” Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 19, Special Issue in Honor of Suzanne G. Cusick (2015): 71-76.
“Homophobia in Twentieth-Century Music: The Crucible of America’s Sound,” American Music, special issue of Dædalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 142.4 (2013): 45-50.