Queerness in Harry Partch's Corporeality: Margins, Hobos, and Embodied Aesthetics

While Harry Partch’s foundational dichotomy of Corporeality and Abstraction is typically examined through the lens of acoustic tuning and performance practice, this paper argues that these concepts are deeply rooted in Partch’s marginal identity as a gay man and itinerant worker. Expanding on research from the author’s vocal sextet In the Shape of a Home, we explore how Partch’s insistence on Corporeality—grounding music in physical bodies, speech rhythms, and tactile instrument construction—functions as an aesthetic of queer resistance. By rejecting the disembodied, sanitized 'Abstraction' of the mid-century European-American academic establishment, Partch constructed a sonic and social space for the marginalized body. This presentation investigates how the dramatic and tuning parameters in In the Shape of a Home embody this queer aesthetic, using spectral analysis of intimate spaces to establish a physical, tactile connection to memory. Ultimately, we argue that the tension between Corporeality and Abstraction represents a broader struggle for self-determination and sonic place-making for the queer outsider, transforming just intonation from a mathematical pursuit into an embodied site of marginalized subjectivity.