Resumen

The extent of queer inclusion in Norway and opera culture has been widely debated among scholars, with them vacillating between acknowledging marked aesthetic and social progress and the continuing discrimination and erasure of queer people in both contexts. These debates are exacerbated by the lack of scholarship on Norwegian queer opera singers. This study addresses these issues through its ethnographic investigation of Norwegian queer opera singers. Specifically, by adopting Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007. Durham, NC: Duke University Press) agential realism and diffractive analysis, it examines the wide spectrum of materialities and discourses that impact the gender and sexuality enactments of said singers, such as the prevailing gender concepts and pedagogical materials that masculinise the male operatic voice. Ultimately, the study challenges the notion of Norway as a conclusively ‘queer friendly’ country by revealing the ongoing and potential constraints and tensions faced by Norwegian queer opera singers. In response to such negativity, this study demonstrates how different ‘touches’ (Barad, Karen. 2012. “On Touching—The Inhuman That Therefore I Am.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 23 (3): 206–223) within Norwegian opera culture might produce new and self-affirming queer operatic lives.