Sam Galloway and I co-wrote an article entitled “Queer Noise: Sounding the Body of Historical Trauma,” which was including in the collection Towards Gender Equality in the Music Industry: Education, Practice and Strategies for Change, edited by Sarah Raine and Catherine Strong. (Bloomsbury, 2019)

“Sannicandro and Galloway uncover a fascinating aspect of the history of industrial and noise music in their case study of the band Fistfuck, composed of Diana Rogerson and Jill Westwood. Contemporaries of Coil and Nurse with Wound, Fistfuck have not been accorded the same respect in histories of these genres despite also doing groundbreaking work. Sannicandro and Galloway argue that there are a number of reasons for this; the very confronting nature of the use of BDSM imagery and practices on stage by the band; the diminution of their contribution because one of the band members, Diane Rogerson, was in a relationship with one of the members of Nurse with Wound; and the lack of recorded material by the band.  The authors argue, however, that it is this very lack of material that opens up space for more interesting readings of the band and the potentials of the music industry itself.  They consider how both noise and BDSM practices implicate the body in ways that mean capturing a performance for posterity in a meaningful form may not even be possible, and the potentialities hinted at in the tiny fragments of their work available to us may do more to open up queer spaces for thinking about bodies, trauma and gender.  This raises questions about how the history of the music industry is written around records that best suit its capitalist form.” -Sarah Raine and Catherine Strong

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