The recent discourse surrounding inclusivity in pedagogy has reached a tipping point where teachers in tertiary environments are altering their practice to implement broader visibility of diversity (Florian 2013). While the key focus of the majority of writing sits within secondary education models or traditional areas of STEM, music and creative practice remains underrepresented in conversations around inclusive pedagogy (Montemayor et al 2018). In gender, Butler argues: Subversiveness is not something that can be gauged or calculated. I do think that for a copy to be subversive of heterosexual hegemony it has to both mime and displace its conventions (in Kotz in Artforum).
In this major-label international release, three different attempts in displacing gender stereotypes were experimented with in the creative output of this research: the degendered implementation a vocal production interacts heavily with the gender-ambiguous range (Dacakis 2000) to create a physical melodic displacement of gendered vocals in a sound recording; Lyrically, the work employs a lost-love story framed in a first person conversational narrative with no pronominal gender identifiers, thus degendering pronoun use; the visual work is a collaboration with non-binary film-makers and a cast of 40 diverse and deliberately gender ambiguous people using a layering technique that never allows the face of any one gender to be viewed at any one time. Let Me Down subverts by way of mimicry and displacement (Butler), responding to how creative work can increase visibility of LGBTIQ+ allyship in music pedagogy.
Let Me Down has been released internationally by Sony Music Australia with over one-million streams over various platforms since it’s 2017 release. The work was also presented in the conference proceedings at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music’s ANZ conference in 2018.