Note that you can change the playback settings to 1080p, it automatically sets it to low resolution.
Living Loud is, in part, a response to the rising anti-trans legislation happening in the United States. In recent years, there have been hundreds of anti-trans bills that have gone through legislatures. I was inspired to create something that challenges these dangerous trends and can educate people in the process.
Living Loud is a multimedia project consisting of an educational short film and this discussion guide. Blending the fields of ethnomusicology, filmmaking, composition, and drag, it is a work of public scholarship that plays with conventions to tell a deeply personal story familiar to many queer people. It is also an opportunity to further develop artistic research, scholarly drag, and confidence to continue challenging the traditional presentation format in the field of ethnomusicology. Typically, we go to conferences and present papers followed by a Q&A, but I think that research has the potential to be much more creative. We spend all our time thinking and theorizing and it's important that everyday people, not just other scholars, have access to it. After all, our work should start and end with community.
The core theme behind my project is gender euphoria. Often when we hear about the negative things that are happening to trans people, it's accompanied by all the negatives of our reality. I wanted to make a short film that instead focuses on uplifting my trans siblings despite this world. There's a difference between gender euphoria and dysphoria. They're not exactly opposite. Euphoria, how I see it, is an opportunity to make sense of the world for ourselves. It's waking up and saying "I'm going to do this because I matter."
