Queer Voice(s) in Turkish-German Music Education : “Melt the Snow”

Kurzfassung/Abstract

Intersectionality, which suggests that axes of oppression are intertwined (Crenshaw, 1989), has increasingly been discussed in the field of music education. Even though it is also a growing area of research in Germany (Dunkel et al., 2022; Grow et al., 2022), the experiences of the LGBTQ+ community within the Turkish-German immigrant context (the largest ethnic minority in Germany) are rarely addressed in music education. By applying thematic content analysis (Mayring, 2022), along with data collection methods such as semi-structured interviews, document analysis, and music analysis (using the toolbox by Müller, 2022, pp. 45-94), this study focuses on Hayal Kaya, a singer-actor who is a trans woman and Turkish immigrant in Germany. She is the first trans actress to play a chief inspector on German television and has also appeared in the highly successful Netflix series Woman of the Dead, for which she contributed to the soundtrack as a singer. The study examines how her voice becomes a site of identity within various axes of oppression, such as race, gender, class, and body (Winker & Degele, 2009, 2011). Emerging themes suggest that her voice—both literally (i.e., singing or speaking voice) and metaphorically (i.e., activist voice)—functions as a symbol of resistance in relation to vocal fluidity, cultural positioning, multilingualism, and transnational voicing. At the same time, it reveals how these voices may be entangled, informed by posthuman performativity studies on voice (Chadwick, 2020; Dieckmann, 2024; Fjeldstad et al., 2024). The study connects these outcomes to the relevance of representation in music education, whether through gender identities, diverse music canons, or languages. Drawing on Barth’s (2013, 2018) suggestion to adopt a meaning-oriented concept of “culture,” it considers how queerness and intersectionality may become integral parts of inter-/transcultural music education discourse in Germany.