MARISSA SILVERMAN
Montclair State University (USA)
December 2025
Published in Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 24 (7): 25–56 [pdf]. https://doi.org/10.22176/act24.7.25
Abstract: What is feminist curiosity and how might it matter for music education? In this essay, the author examines curiosity, specifically feminist curiosity in combination with wonder and generosity, loving and not knowing. Elsewhere, the author has written on loving and not knowing (e.g., Silverman 2009, 2025); that previous work is leaned into while focusing on feminist curiosity. In doing so, the author discusses Laura Mulvey’s Fetishism and Curiosity (1996), Cynthia Enloe’s The Curious Feminist (2004) and Twelve Feminist Lessons on War (2023), and Perry Zurn’s Curiosity and Power (2021a), respectively. These works are then utilized to consider feminist curiosity for music education. This essay ends with implications and questions for music teaching and learning.
Keywords: Curiosity, feminist curiosity, relational ethics, music teaching, music learning
On Sundays, my email inbox contains a new release of the blog by Maria Popova, The Marginalian. Thoughtfully and artistically crafted pieces, Popova’s (2024) comments about “words” struck me, particularly as I considered the Call for Papers for this special issue of Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education (or ACT): “To care about the etymologies of words is to care about the origins of the world’s story about itself. To broaden and deepen the meanings of words…is to broaden and deepen life itself. It is of words that we build the two great pylons propping up our sense of reality: concepts and stories.”[1]
Likely anyone who has published in ACT, or any journal for that matter, has experienced their share of both positive and negative critique, judgement, and commentary connected to the words, concepts, and stories they utilized to express themselves. And while what follows does not focus on the peer-review process, I cannot help but recall select peer review experiences. For example, at a conference in 2008 after I presented on “love” and music teaching and learning, a peer stated: “I’m uncomfortable with the word ‘love’ connected to the context of music education and schooling.”
Years later, and responding to my chapter on “care” where I (2023) discussed specific prepositions connected to music educators’ use of the word “care” (i.e., caring-about, caring-for, caring-with, and caring-through), a peer reviewer expressed feeling, more or less, degrees of frustration and impatience with my examination, particularly that which did not directly connect the reader to instances/examples in music education.
While I am not suggesting that the peer review process is faulty—though, sometimes it is—nor am I suggesting these peers were wrong, I wondered, then, upon receiving these comments and critiques, and, again, now: Why this discomfort? Why this impatience? Why not, in a detailed way, whether uncomfortable or not, consider these words and their potential import for music teaching and learning? These questions, then, as is customary for me, and the stories I continued to tell myself, afforded more questions, such as: Why am I curious about words such as “love” and “care”? Notably, these particular words and numerous others can frame an examination into the potencies and potentials (and “concepts and stories”) of music and music teaching and learning, so interrogating and considering them carefully seems like important means to, potentially, significant ends. A deluge of further wonderings flooded my mind. After much cognitive and emotional back and forth, inquisitive meaning making propelled me further until I landed, finally, on the following: Does curiosity matter for music education? This launching pad, and my inherent curiosity, helped me become curious about curiosity.
Why be and become curious about curiosity for music education? I teach both preservice and inservice music educators within higher education. And, again, thanks to another post from Popova’s blog, I found myself linked with a beautifully illustrated volume of Pablo Neruda’s (2022) The Book of Questions. Upon reading Popova’s words[2] and purchasing the “children’s book,” I brought it into my own classrooms and wondered, with students, whether it could serve as a vehicle for teaching public school students the importance of developing and sustaining curiosity. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss the curricular impact of this book on my own teaching and those of the students I teach, one inservice music teachers’ remarks seems particularly telling after we read aloud many of Neruda’s musings: “I am too busy” to pay attention to so many questions. This incident, connected to my remembering select peer reviewers’ discomfort and impatience with my work, instigated my curiosity.
In some ways, though not exhaustively (as I cannot provide in-depth analyses and insight on all the related literature I examined), the following is a timeline (in the order these sources were read) of my quest to be curious about “curiosity” for music education. Here, I examine curiosity, specifically feminist curiosity in combination with wonder and generosity, loving and not knowing. While elsewhere I have written on loving and not knowing (e.g., Silverman 2009, 2025), this paper leans into that previous work and focuses on feminist curiosity, a conceptual prospect I had yet to find my way towards.
After providing preliminary considerations on “curiosity,” I discuss Laura Mulvey’s Fetishism and Curiosity (1996), Cynthia Enloe’s The Curious Feminist (2004) and Twelve Feminist Lessons on War (2023), and Perry Zurn’s Curiosity and Power (2021a), respectively. This scholarship helped me query feminist curiosity for music education. Because of this, I end with implications for music teaching and learning.
Please note that while leaning into Popova’s above-mentioned call to “care about” the meanings of words and by being curious about curiosity for music education, I am not suggesting that music teachers lack curiosity. It is not my place to assume such a stance. Rather, I consider scholars’ views about curiosity outside music education and then wonder how such examinations might assist music educators.
For me, considering the scholarship below assumes important matters—particularly when distinguishing between “curiosity” and “feminist curiosity”—highlighted by the soon-to-be discussed Cynthia Enloe, herself a fearless activist and “curious feminist.” Namely, being a feminist necessitates a commitment to “justice,” which seeks “to nurture creativity and fairness,” which seeks to “cultivate curiosity” (Enloe 2014, 20). Additionally, part of this curiosity, states Enloe, presupposes that “it is poor analysis to imagine that all causes” and change because of those causes, “originate internally” (15–16) within a particular field or domain. Thus, “curiosity, generosity, openness which matter most” helps “to build skills; it is continuing to learn from others” (18). Being a curious feminist centers justice-oriented questioning, probing, and sincere, care-filled action in the hopes of understanding.
Preliminary Considerations
Curiosity does not always yield positive results. Exemplars from literature, popular culture, and well-worn aphorisms point out potential problems with curiosity. For example, the trite “curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back” does not bode well. In Greek mythology, Pandora’s curiosity (discussed in some detail below) leads to the unleashing of monstrosities into the world, for which Pandora could not fix. Written 2nd-century AD in Apuleius’ (1996) Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass), Psyche, the stereotypical transgressive female, experiences a series of punishments for curiously witnessing her husband, Cupid’s, earthly form. In “De curiositate” (On being a busybody), written as part of De Moralia in the 1st-century AD, Plutarch (1939) considered curiosity a vice, a “disease” of the mind that manifested through a meddlesome gaze. Prior to that in the Bible, Eve’s “curiosity” yielded “original sin” and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. As playwright Aphra Behn (1687/1984) wrote in The Lucky Chance, “Too much curiosity lost Paradise.” It seems clear from the “Bluebeard” myth that curiosity (particularly of the female kind) needs to be curtailed. Numerous other characters possess sometimes questionable degrees of curiosity, such as (listed in no particular order): Kimmy Schmidt (from “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”), Nemo (from “Finding Nemo”), George (from Curious George), and Princess Ann (from “Roman Holiday”). Notably, too, Alice, from Lewis Carroll’s (1971) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, becomes “curioser and curioser,” which, in turn, leads the character through many nonsensical, somewhat grotesque, and sometimes violent experiences, where only the “male” characters have agency over their choices.
Speaking further about preliminary considerations about curiosity for music education, in ancient Greece, mousikē “referred to a wide range of artistic and theoretical activities, including singing, dancing, poetry, storytelling, mythology, and rhythm and melody accompanied by gestures and poses performed by amateur actors” (Elliott and Silverman 2015, 58). Mousikē existed as a “spectacle,” and, therefore, demanded curious spectators (Doroszewska 2019). In today’s context, sometimes the curious spectatorship of music can yield an open-hearted, ethical quest for relational engagement and understanding; sometimes not. (More on gazing and spectatorship below when I discuss the scholarship of Mulvey and Zurn.)
So, what does “curiosity” mean, and might it often be problematic? Not necessarily. For example, Alice finds self-discovery and open-mindedness thanks, in part, to her chase of the rabbit down the rabbit hole. Given this, and numerous other examples where “curiosity” yields potentially fruitful results, what might the word’s origins help music educators understand? What qualifiers, if any, might curiosity need? Common sense already suggests a desire for understanding is, in part, one of the aims of education and schooling. What more needs examination?
Etymologically, “curiosity” emerged in the 14th century meaning, then, “a careful attention to detail.” While this sense of the word no longer exists, it also marked a “desire to know or learn, inquisitiveness.” The Old French, curiosete, meant “curiosity, avidity, choosiness” (Modern French, curiosité). From the Latin, curiositatem (nominative curiositas[3]), explored a “desire of knowledge, inquisitiveness,” and curiosus meant a “careful, diligent; inquiring eagerly, meddlesome,” which related also to cura meaning “care.” The word’s roots, then, denote care, yet also a potential binary, namely being “meddlesome.” What this word’s origin[4] suggests, then, is that curiosity-and-care were (and perhaps should continue to be) partners while attempting to understand the unknown.
Because curiosity can be both a blessing and curse, as some forms of curiosity can seem intrusive, I next consider particular scholars’ views in crafting an understanding of feminist curiosity. Doing so may highlight similar constructions of curiosity-as-care and caring-as-curiosity. More, feminist curiosity might be an important means to ethical ends, whether on its own terms or as a mechanism for music education as/for activism (for related discussions on music education as/for activism[5], see Gould 2025; Hess 2019; Silverman 2024). By stating this, I recognize that not all might view “relational ethics” as activistic (Nussbaum 2013), whereas others might (Collins 1990; hooks 1984, 1994, 2000, 2003, 2015, 2022; Lorde 1984).
Still, as Lauren Guilmette (2014) explains, “curiosity marks our relational and embodied engagement with difference—that with which ‘we’ do not identify, whoever this ‘we’ might be” (291). Additionally, when combined with care, curiosity can potentially escape its “maligned history”—whether understood as nosiness, thrill-seeking, meddling, prying, and more—and be the “potentially transformative mode of attention that Foucault calls curiosity-as-care—‘the care one takes of what exists and what might exist….’” (291–92). Guilmette (2017) explains elsewhere, “ambiguity” is key to Foucault’s curiosity-as-care. Seeking “the” truth, according to Foucault, can be an act of violence thereby asserting the necessity for “caring,” for uncovering multiple truths, for sitting with and through degrees of uncertainty, and for not knowing (Davis 2002). “The will-to-know,” therefore, can “be productively rerouted, such that the desire to understand could mean something other than the desire to control” (Guilmette 2017, 17). Curiosity-as-caring could pave the way towards important teaching-and-learning potentials.
Fetishism and Curiosity by Laura Mulvey
Once I considered the roots of curiosity, I next sought the work of one of the first theorists who explicitly discussed feminist curiosity. I decided to go this route in my reading and thinking because of the “caring” essence of curiosity. For if the word’s origins suggest a caring mode of being-with and being-for (within music education, see Hendricks 2023; Silverman 2023), then a feminist perspective on curiosity cannot be too far behind.
A Fellow of the British Academy since 2000, film theorist and filmmaker, Professor Emeritus of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, Laura Mulvey[6] has traced the history of feminist thought as it pertains to psychoanalytic understandings of creativity, media, and film. In primarily a collection of previously published and adapted essays (the exception being the third chapter on Marilyn Monroe, which Mulvey crafted for a lecture series), Fetishism and Curiosity (1996) seeks to connect, among other concerns and considerations, the role of the nonconscious mind and how it impacts what and how viewers/experiencers interpret through modes of curiosity. As Mulvey’s interests stem from experimental cinema and its examination through the lens of the Women’s Liberation Movement, and while the whole range of essays provides interesting and provocative considerations in analyzing film (read: creativity), I wish to focus specifically on the fourth chapter, “Pandora’s Box: Topographies of Curiosity.”
As already alluded to, and as typically interpreted, Pandora’s curiosity brought evil to the world “and woman brought misery to man” (Mulvey 1996, 53). Mulvey draws readers in immediately by challenging this myth and writes, “the myth of Pandora is about feminine curiosity, but it can only be decoded by feminist curiosity” (54; italics in original). How so? When viewed through the lens of patriarchy, onlookers view Pandora as, among other attributes, a feminine “enigma” whose curiosity appears “transgressive and dangerous” (61). However, when viewed through a feminist lens, Pandora’s curiosity lives as a transgressive act to witness and understand, for the first time, her inner and outer worlds, and the repressions she has experienced. The “monster” of being an objectified body, according to Mulvey, yields liberation once released; while curiosity compels Pandora to free herself from these chains of objectification, a fetishism also exists when onlookers refuse to see difference (Mulvey 1996). For Mulvey, a feminist curiosity exists as a “political, critical, creative drive” (62) that allows an “othered” body to be seen and potentially heard on its own terms.
Reading Mulvey’s work caused me to wonder about the ways in which “othered” persons—whether primarily female-identifying or not; note, too, that Mulvey’s (1975, 1992) work examined the “male gaze,” a term she coined in 1973[7]—perceive themselves and re-orient their countenance due to curious spectatorship. I wondered how such spectatorship can show-up in music making and music teaching and learning (e.g., othering musics and music makers, whether consciously or nonconsciously). I also wondered how such curious spectatorship manifested nonconscious patriarchal structures. Because of this, I sought help from scholarship that examined the lived-experiences of female-identifying persons, particularly as they experienced “conflict” and negotiated sites of struggle.
The Curious Feminist and Twelve Feminist Lessons on War by Cynthia Enloe
Feminist scholars, regardless of the domain of inquiry—whether through ecofeminism, radical feminism, intersectional feminism, cyber feminism, and more—all examine and search for equity, particularly as it pertains to gender and identity(s). United States-based political feminist theorist and Research Professor in the Department of Sustainability and Social Justice at Clark University, and a pioneer of international relations through decades of challenging gender-blindness, Enloe studies war and gender. Focusing on the marginalization of women worldwide who have experienced militarism, Enloe has sought and continues to seek a feminist world politics. Through a pointed scrutiny of the unsustainable conditions that women and girls experience throughout war—the before, during, and after—Enloe reveals the patriarchal machine of authority by deconstructing mechanisms of domination and control in the hopes of developing sustainable peace and security for all.
Primarily a collection of essays, The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age Empire presents stories of women mostly in non-Western contexts. In this book among others, Enloe curiously cares for people through the cases she uncovers and hopes to diminish the invisibility enforced by male-centered, patriarchal systems within the global economy. Here, Enloe[8] contextualizes women’s lives, what they do, and how their agency (or a lack thereof) helps shape a more accurate accounting of global political life. While seemingly not theoretical, Enloe’s feminism “evolves” across the pages. Notably, her curiosity “takes energy,” yet, for Enloe (2004), this investment is part of what makes curiosity possible (1).
From the very first page, she wonders about labels and the categorizations of people, places, and things: “Take the loaded adjective ‘natural’” (1). If women “naturally” stay at home, then men become the generals who fight the wars. The “natural” order necessitates no investment of energy. But such designations and categories are not categorical. As Enloe (2004) states in an interview with Marysia Zalewski, “I get quite worried about boxes because boxes say I’ve stopped thinking” (90). This forms the genesis of Enloe’s (2004) “evolving” curiosity: questioning status quo habits and habitats; attempting to understand otherness in the hopes of showcasing relations of power, which includes the “margins, silences, and bottom rungs” (23). As she says, “I have become more and more curious about curiosity and its absence” (2). Enloe attempts to create a more accurate portrait of international politics, one less like “a Superman comic strip” and more like “a Jackson Pollack painting” (23). A more realistic portrait, Enloe writes, with its messiness and unclear lines, might prove fruitful as people attempt to reconcile the burden and therefor inheritance of complacency.
For Enloe (2004), to understand politics as well as international relationships, scholars become more honest with a feminist curiosity that “specifies the conditions and decisions that turned women into victims” (104), a feminist curiosity that looks to answer her pointed, direct question: “Where are the women?” They are the “mothers [who] are lawyers, full-time volunteers in organizations, newspaper readers, diplomatic wives or CIA wives” (84) who, in addition to others, help to make up the many bodies impacted by inequity, inequality, war, violence, economic hardships and pains, intolerance, and beyond. In seeking a wide range of political processes, and not just the experiences of women, Enloe asks theorists to question concepts such as “natural” and “traditional,” and interrogate words like “always” and “never” (1–3). While her theoretical approach is much like an ethnographer or anthropologist, she happens to be a political theorist.
Subsequently, and in some ways picking up where The Curious Feminist left off, in Twelve Feminist Lessons on War, Enloe (2023) draws upon the untold experiences of war-torn insiders—women—from around the world; from Ukraine, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Fiji, Israel, Northern Ireland, and Turkey. Each chapter of the book presents lessons learned from real women experiencing real wars. I include each chapter’s title below without discussing Enloe’s lessons. My hope is readers’ curiosity will pique, critical reflection will follow, and reading the book will be the result:
- Women’s wars are not men’s wars
- Every war is fought in gendered history
- Getting men to fight isn’t so easy
- Women as soldiers is not liberation
- Women as armed insurgents offer feminist caveats
- Wounds matter—wounds are gendered
- Make wartime rape visible
- Feminists organize while war is raging
- “Post-war” can last generations
- Militarization starts during peacetime
- Ukrainian feminists have lessons to teach us about war
- Feminist lessons are for everyone
Part of being a curious feminist necessitates listening to and speaking with others. Enloe (2004) explains that specifically understanding women’s stories help people recognize the lessons marginalized experiences (inclusive of all genders and historically marginalized peoples) teach. For Enloe, feminist curiosity does its best work when done in consort with the stakeholders for whom struggle, inequity, oppression, and discrimination exist as facts of life. Enacting feminist curiosity concerns and carefully examines—with insiders, not for insiders—that which has been “infantilize[d], ignore[d], trivialize[d],… and scorne[d]” (2004, 5) due to a patriarchal world order. Indeed, in the last lesson from Twelve Feminist Lessons of War, Enloe (2023) asks to expand the feminist camp through feminist curiosity by creating a “sustainable stamina, and solidarity” because “to become feminist in our efforts at solidarity, we need to learn about each other’s gendered histories, each other’s gendered economies, each other’s gendered hopes and worries” (167).
The topic of war and its gendered-ness caused me to wonder about knowledge systems at play within and across music education classrooms and rehearsal spaces—or power roles that exist—particularly when considering unknown experiences, people, places, and things. For how many “wars”—both large and small—have erupted due to mis-understandings and/or dis-understandings? What layers exist and potentially mask the possibility for (both open and closed forms of) curiosity in music teaching and learning? Can and in what ways might music teachers and learners listen curiously? My next section addresses such questions and concerns.
Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry by Perry Zurn
Visiting Associate Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University and Provost Associate Professor of Philosophy at American University, Perry Zurn[9] (2021a, 2021b, 2021c) examines numerous concepts and aspects from diverse fields of inquiry such as political philosophy, critical theory, transgender studies, psychology, and neuroscience, while also considering the politics of inquiry and voice, material histories of resistance, poetics, and ecology. Still Zurn centers much of his thinking on curiosity.
By way of some background connected to Zurn’s analyses, the feminist and civil rights activist Carol Hanisch popularized the phrase, “the personal is political”; this became one of the slogans of second-wave feminism in the United States. With this phrase, Hanisch meant that all matters—e.g., educational, historical, pedagogical, musical, cultural—showcase personal histories, stories, and problems within public arenas. Moreover, political matters showcase personal allegiances, interpretations, beliefs, and more. And when people share allegiances, interpretations, and beliefs, they exist politically because of the sharing that ensues. Foundationally, then, politics illustrates relational ways of being in the world. And politics “is the process by which we come to understand and organize ourselves as social beings, within human and nonhuman environments” (Zurn 2021a, 11).
For feminists, political-ness serves as the nexus for everything a person thinks, does, and believes (e.g., Ahmed 2013, 2017). Therefore, politics and engaging politically, for feminists, are not solely activities that reside inside governmental habitats; nor, does politics and engaging politically solely frame, say, war and peace. Politics and engaging politically, for feminists, extends through everyday living. In an interview, Sara Ahmed discusses the deep essence of the phrase: “the personal is political.” She states: “it actually is a very demanding speech act. It requires us not only to transform our understanding of what counts as politics to include the sphere of the intimate life, the family, and sexuality, but it also changes our understanding of the personal” (Tuori and Peltonen 2007, 262).
What would happen, then, if, in line with the likes of Enloe and other curious feminists, as Zurn suggests, theorists and thinkers examined “curiosity”; what might that afford for our personal-political ways of being in the world? In a generous way, through Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry, Zurn (2021a) considers such underpinnings, for as he very plainly and potently states, curiosity means connection, but it “can also break connection” (vii).
Curiosity can be marked by or masked through power. Though unlike the political enterprises that Enloe examined—namely war—curiosity exemplifies more overt, explicit, in many ways vulnerable (even intimate) relational stances. Because of this, curiosity’s potential impact (whether harmful or virtuous) is a social force worthy of examination. Through a decolonial investigation, Zurn “invites curiosity” and “inspires inquiry” through wondering about “the construction of canons, the pillars and peripheries of knowledge, and the foundations of education and their political histories, the banner made palpable a clash of curiosities” (10). Therefore, Zurn’s book is as much a matter for politics, generally, as it is for music education, specifically. He asks: “Where do we get our questions? Where do we direct our questions? What are we looking for and who are we looking with? And how ought we to function within exclusionary institutions of inquiry?” (10). Such questions seem germane to everyday living. More, they seem germane for the music education profession.
Zurn queries curiosity and challenges its more typically interpreted stance as information seeking. Stated differently, when not engaged through a feminist lens, curiosity can provoke a stance that seeks acquisitional knowledge, where “X” is the object and the seeker, investigator, and individual who hunts down information: an order that suggests, as does Zurn, “units of knowers and units of knowledge” (note: consider the similarity here with Freire’s “banking concept” of education). Instead, when inviting and inspiring inquiry, curiosity can become “a social praxis … informed by and constructive of political architectures.” So, “curiosity is political” (12); it can connect or tear apart.
For example, Zurn opens the book with two narratives from history that illustrate his point. The first of Sarah Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman also known as “the Hottentot Venus,” illustrated in history as an example of curiosity[10] insofar as mostly white men paraded her around as a “freakshow attraction,” as spectacle, for onlookers’ entertainment. And while she died December 29, 1815, the exhibition of her lasted over a hundred years as her brain, skeleton, and sexual organs remained on display in Paris museums until 1974 (first at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle until 1937; then transferred to the Musée de l’Homme in “case number 33”). Thanks to Nelson Mandela, “her remains were repatriated and buried in South Africa August 9, 2002, National Women’s Day” (Zurn 2021a, 4). Clearly this kind of curiosity objectifies, degrades, and fetishizes (to borrow from Mulvey 1996, above); it is not isolated to this example as colonial culture and racist ideology “aestheticizes” difference. Connected to Baartman’s case, Black feminist scholarship called for a different kind of curiosity, one that sought to “right the wrongs of the specific curiosity-formations institutionalized in the exhibitions, museums, and scientific discourses of Baartman’s time, as well as the academic treatments of her since” (5). Rather than fetishize her, and any other living entity who experienced trauma, Black feminist scholarship sought to love and care-for Baartman.[11]
In contrast, the second narrative, and one that illustrates feminist curiosity, Zurn shares the story of writer, anthropologist, and film maker Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960); connected to Hurston’s narrative, Zurn shares how Alice Walker’s curiosity for Hurston manifested in family and intimacy. In brief, and by way of some background, Hurston herself lived “full of curiosity” and became an anthropologist of Black American folklore. She invented a new method of scholarly examination, embedding herself inside communities where she became a proponent of participant observation and other forms of ethnographic work. As Hurston stated: “Research is formalized curiosity” (cited in Zurn, 9). Yet, as Zurn points out, despite a prolific career, “Hurston died all but forgotten” (9), and so much so that Walker made it through college and, at the start of her publishing career, had yet to know of or about Hurston. So in 1973, “against all odds and in search of her literary ancestry, Alice went looking for Zora,” and the rest is, well, rewritten, or, better stated, de-erased history. “Prying open the ivory halls, and rebuilding bonds of kinship between and among Black practitioners of curiosity and imagination,” Zurn (2021a) writes, “Walker had found family” (10). As Walker (1983) declared while on her Zora Neal Hurston expedition, Hurston existed as “my aunt … and that of all Black people” (cited in Zurn 2021a, 10). And while Walker did not literally share genealogical blood-ties to Hurston, she noted the “lie” of relationship felt truer than most truths (Walker 1983). Still, why note this history being de-erased? Hurston’s significance and geniality existed; however, no one cared enough to unearth her literary importance; no one cared enough to connect with her humanity. Rather than continue to keep her voice as a writer silent, as she had been historically marginalized, quieted, and practically erased, Walker’s curiosity discovered for herself and uncovered for others the magnificent contributions of Hurston’s legacy.
Following these specific narratives, Zurn (2021a) states and asks the following:
Attending to the politics of curiosity does much to complicate, although not to answer, the age-old question: Is curiosity even a good thing? Instead of asking whether curiosity is a vice or a virtue in general, the political history of curiosity pushes us to ask: In what social contexts and within what political relations has curiosity counted or functioned as a vice or a virtue. Attunement to these political dimensions, moreover, prompts us to widen the range of philosophical questions we ask about curiosity. To canonical questions regarding the ethics and epistemology of curiosity, we must add sociopolitical questions. In what ways are political relations constructive of curiosity? In what ways are political structures consistent—or inconsistent—with curiosity? How us curiosity complicit in—or disruptive of—political inequality? What sorts of technologies of curiosity support the status quo and which are uniquely tuned to political resistance movements? How have marginalized groups retooled curiosity through the work of their own liberation? And what happens when politicized forces of curiosity clash? (44–45)
As Zurn’s book assists readers to understand the political history of curiosity, Curiosity and Power traces curiosity from ancient Greece and the writings of Plato and Aristotle to medieval Europe and beyond. Additionally, Zurn includes case studies or, what he calls, “episodes from political theory,” namely examinations of the work of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derrida. As these episodes declare, as do the stories of Baartman, Hurston, and Walker, curiosity is neither wholly positive nor negative.
For example, and because of my previous mention of Foucault from the work of Guilmette (2014), Zurn reveals Foucault as a “curious figure” in both scholarship (i.e., philosophical examinations) and life or “personal exploration” (73). As Zurn’s brilliant assessment of Foucault’s work declares, “institutionalized curiosity” exists as a mechanism to “(re)produce” subjects, particularly those “deemed abnormal or peripheral … the sick, the mad, the child, the accused, the criminal, or the sexually deviant. It seeks them out for objectification and control typically within spaces expressly arranged for that task” (77–78), such as in hospitals, schools, classrooms, prisons: places and spaces that, for Zurn through Foucault, “capture” and constrain. While institutionalized curiosity harms, curiosity as resistance—in other words, a feminist curiosity—acts as a “counterforce” in search of freedom.
Much more could be said about Zurn’s analysis of Foucault, not to mention his beautiful read of Nietzsche and Derrida, all which explore curiosity in distinct ways. For now, Zurn’s curiosity with and through the historical and philosophical turns of curiosity trace how “illusions of colonial sovereignty” can “disintegrate” when “humility” and “thinking with a radical vulnerability” recognize “entangled intimacies, permeable borders, and irrepressible reservoirs of significance and signification” (123).
Additionally, Zurn provides a “methodology” of sorts, of how to conceptualize a political resistant curiosity through communal praxis. This praxis avoids specifics yet invites considerations from and leans into political activism,[12] crip studies,[13] and trans studies,[14] which paves the way forward for a plural approach to engaging the “in betweenness” of knowing: between humility and gentleness; between knowing and not knowing; between caring about, with, and for; between a meandering of openness and vulnerability that can benefit, not only political theory and philosophy, but also more connected living with room for a “yes-and” way of understanding and love. For Zurn, this means to reclaim curiosity, or better stated, to crip curiosity with an awareness of the ableist history at the core of its political history: “To crip curiosity … means more than to disrupt the subject-object divide.… It also means to redefine curiosity outside of an Enlightenment framework” (160).
By cripping curiosity, Zurn helps readers “unsettle curiosity” with an embracing hope towards activism that “insist[s] upon opacity, ambiguity, and intimacy” (199). Leaning into the work of Christina León (2020), Zurn (2021a) states that opacity is a necessary counterpart to feminist curiosity. Thus, curiosity “can retain a certain humility; it can remain open and engaged” through opacity. Without opacity, “curiosity becomes violent, hubristic” (Zurn 2021a, 203) and stifles otherness. Indeed, according to León, opacity “hastens us to be humble in the pursuits of knowledge, to keep relation and reading open, and to infuse our imaginaries with the unknown—not to domesticate or to know, but to keep learning” (182, cited in Zurn 2021a, 203–204).
In discussing “opacity,” Zurn draws readers’ attention back to Sarah Baartman’s story. As explained, the more the curious crowds sought out a glimpse of her, the more “unknowable” she became; the subject-object divide perpetuated the power of Enlightenment ownership and “property” status. However, Black feminists respected the opaqueness of Baartman’s body, thereby engaging in an intimate stance similar to Luce Irigaray’s “to-you,” which moves “beyond patriarchal structures [that] accepts another by cultivating two subjects through love” (Silverman 2025, 197). According to Zurn through León (2020), opacity is a necessary component of feminist curiosity. The key, then, is to keep asking questions, to keep leaning in, to keep learning with others: “opacity is curiosity’s growth principle” (Zurn 2021a, 206) in pursuit of “ambiguity.”
Like opacity, ambiguity, too, according to Zurn (2021a), “is unsettling.” Ambiguity “threatens not only binary ways of knowing but binaristic conceptions of knowers and knowns” (207). More, the legacy of ambiguity “insists … alternative ontologies (and epistemologies) of relation. In ambiguity, curiosity is beautifully entangled” (207). Returning to Baartman’s legacy, Black feminist theorists refuse to let this story go; they continue to question this legacy. As Zurn states: “Questions that crack and that develop inside cracks are attendants to the wisdom of ambiguity … [it] invites complexity and honors multiplicity … curiosity dies when ambiguity subsides” (211). Ambiguity, then, proposes an unknowable, “uncertain” future, which, in turn, yields an unsettling intimacy.
Revisiting Baartman’s story, Black feminists insist upon returning to and addressing “the historical harms of (especially colonial and anti-Black) objectification with present-day practices of ‘intimacy[15]’” (212). How so? Artists, poets, dancers, and beyond have focused their creative energies to “holding [Baartman] close” and “re-remembering” that which was “dis-membered” (212).
Additionally, and beyond Black feminism, Zurn illustrates the many ways Indigenous philosophy “theorizes intimacy in relation to curiosity—intimacies between humans, the earth, and ecologies of knowledge” (213). Accordingly, non-settler models exist that consist of relational networks of intimacy, “place-based experiential learning,” which is paired with “heart-based learning and community engagement” (214). To conclude this discussion of Curiosity and Power, Zurn (2021a) acknowledges a way forward, towards listening “between and beneath” that, to borrow from Lisa Delpit (2006), finds “roots and routes” toward oscillation, resistance, and growth.
It seems clear to me that Zurn’s feminist curiosity may help music teachers and learners position themselves best through simultaneously existing as teachers and learners, that teachers engage best while constantly being and becoming teachers and learners, that students also engage best while constantly being and becoming teachers and learners. According to Zurn, while we cannot necessarily know what “should be,” we are certain it should be otherwise. Framed with humility, teachers’ and learners’ potential lives and breathes with opacity, ambiguity, and intimacy through provisionally and consistently inquiring within and across multiple musics and histories, while “becoming confident in our knowledge” (Zurn 2021b, 8) as much as becoming certain of not knowing (Davis 2002).
Implications for Music Education
I begin this final section by returning to Popova’s words: “to broaden and deepen the meanings of words … is to broaden and deepen life itself.” My hope is readers’ considerations of “curiosity”—its meanings and potential misgivings—might afford more curiosity. Speaking personally, my own curiosity about curiosity has not waned since engaging with the texts surveyed throughout this paper. Rather, I feel more curious.
How might a discussion of these thinkers’ scholarship—all beyond the “box” of music education—help music education employ feminist curiosity for music teaching and learning? First, Mulvey’s feminist interpretations of mythology remind us that, interpretations exist because people create them, not because interpretations and meanings exist sui genesis to the experience or phenomena “itself.” Leaning into Mulvey (1996), music, through its teaching, is not an “it” (or a box), but a window into our own interiority. How teachers and learners lean into musicing can expand or contract depending on the lens(es) for which the musicers and listeners experience phenomena. This matters for musical meaning making, as well as the teaching of musical interpretation (whether teaching students to be makers or listeners). Additionally, Mulvey’s work yields direct implications for an acknowledgment that what music teachers believe to be true about classroom relationships may not be objective fact, and instead open to a wide range of interpretations. The more stakeholders connected to those classroom/rehearsal experiences exist, the more open and porous such experiences can be.
Second, as Enloe (2023) explains, it is “not enough” to feel sympathy or empathy for others: “To become feminist in our efforts at solidarity, we need to learn about each other’s gendered histories, each other’s gendered economies, each other’s gendered hopes and worries” (167). To be a curious feminist in music teaching and learning necessitates listening curiously. This matters, more and more, when reaching for inclusivity and equity across music education places and spaces. And while music education is not “at war,” Enloe’s ask for researchers, theorists, and practitioners to deconstruct taken for granted assumptions about binaries such as “development” and “growth,” “war” and “peace,” “empowering” and “disempowering” experiences seems germane to considering equitably framed educational and musical needs for students and their communities.
And third, Zurn reminds us that, while it is important we query our own “soil” from whence we came, we must also query with those from our locales and those not. Because of this, feminist curiosity is “communal” (with humans and non-humans), “coalitional,” and, among other attributes, “humble”[16] (Zurn 2021b, 3). Feminist curiosity “looks to the future with an eye of faith, of rebellious hope” (4) in seeking out inequities and interrogating power imbalances. Because it takes an activistic approach, like much of the work from the civil rights movement, feminist curiosity enacts political resistance, whether through nonviolent action, protests, or engaging in noncooperation (Zurn 2021a). As such, feminist curiosity “names an aesthetics and a politics of endless asking that maintains a suspicion toward any authority figure offering final solutions” (Edwards 2012 cited in Zurn 2021a, 135). Feminist curiosity attempts to build a better world through education, while keeping possibilities “incomplete and open” for a future yet to be known and simultaneously unknowable. Feminist curiosity resists erasures of history and instead commits to open and honest inquiry in search of a fragile future through querying together with one another. Feminist curiosity, as Zurn declares, searches for networks of possibilities, where individualized power and control are checked and balanced with communal integrity, freedom, and possibility as goals to be constantly pursuing.
In what ways might we examine music education from curious feminist perspectives? While scholars within the profession began this good work in the late 1980s and 1990s (e.g., Lamb 1987; Gould 1992; McCarthy 1999; Morton 1994; for succinct analysis of this history, see Howe 2014, 2025), much work still needs to be done (Silverman and Niknafs 2025). If Enloe and Zurn’s considerations about militarism, war, power, and inequities pave a way for a more honest and open understanding of historically marginalized persons and contexts, thereby illustrating the necessity for a feminist curiosity, then how might such approaches to and stamina for feminist curiosity open dialogues that take place beyond the confines of our own backyards, music classrooms, and rehearsal spaces?
In line with Zurn, and speaking personally, I must find ways into trans studies and crip studies; I must continue to query with political activists, Black feminists, and Indigenous ways of knowing-being. The following music education scholarship seems like important openings as I continue to “unsettle” my own praxes: Churchill and Laes (2021), Garrett and Palkki (2021), Grissom-Broughton (2020), Hess (2024), Isabirye (2021), Maus and colleagues (2022), Prest and colleagues (2021), among other scholarship. While I presently have a cursory familiarity with these works as well as others that “unsettle” taken for granted assumptions within music education, I look forward to diving deeper into such examinations. I am curious about leaning in, asking questions, and seeking pathways that provide openings for my work.
Speaking of the profession’s backyard, for quite some time I have asked (in both writing and across my own classroom practices) the following: Are classroom music making spaces inclusive, equitable, diverse, and just? If not, what are we—teachers and students—doing to query such matters, and with whom are we querying? Is the curriculum we—teachers and students—create representative of the classroom, community, region, and country in which we live? Which communities do we—teachers and students—center while music making and why? In what ways can we—teachers and students—question the “state” of music education, question what is taken for granted across music education places and spaces (see D’Aoust for further discussion of “problematizing” through feminist curiosity)? While I know I am not alone in asking such questions (e.g., Bradley 2012, 2015; Dungee 2020; Goble 2010; Hendricks 2018; Hess 2018; Koza 2010; Recharte 2019; Vaugeois 2014), I wonder if the profession has been adequately curious about pursuing these questions. Notably, however, such questions should not be answered “once and for all,” but rather with each and every music teaching and learning encounter. Therefore, we—teachers and students—should be and become curious feminists if the profession is to fully “show up” for all; we must continue to question, challenge, and change that which does not serve the students and communities in our care.
It seems to me (along with other scholars) that addressing questions and engaging in dialogues matter if the music education profession professes the importance of inclusivity. This takes effort, engagement, and consistent “imagining, listening, and learning,” thereby “sustained curiosity” (Enloe 2023, 167). I would add, as would hooks (2000), this involves “loving” (see also Silverman 2009, 2025). The loving we extend and enact, particularly when we are outsiders, must activate a sustained curiosity to continuously learn and unlearn assumptions or biases in order to be and become careful listeners in dialogue.
The previously discussed scholarship may help the music education profession grapple with not only the conditions (e.g., places and spaces) that make learning music possible, but more so with the kind of learning music teachers and learners want to help foster. Thinking solely of the music making that teachers and students employ, what might that making, learning, re-learning, and listening “feel like” were music classrooms and ensemble spaces centered on and responsive to, using Zurn’s (2021a) words, “ambiguity, opacity, and intimacy”? More, what kind of institutionalized curiosity—note: Zurn’s read of Foucault—does music education hold that gets in the way of pursuing “ambiguity, opacity, and intimacy”? What classrooms and rehearsal spaces treat the musics they make as an “object”[17] to be mastered rather than a relationship-with to nurture, develop, and grow? And how can the sites of music education’s institutionalized curiosity become sites of possibility through feminist curiosity and radical vulnerability?
To return to Davis’s (2002) thinking, when possessing a willingness to love through “not knowing,” I acknowledge that curious, engaged listening-with and listening-for are the starting points for realizing positions and places that illustrate “knowing and not knowing, proximity and distance, intimacy and inaccessibility” (267; see also Irigaray 1996; Silverman 2015, 2023, 2025). I look forward to leaning into these possibilities through music (re)learning, music listening, musicing, and music sharing; through educating myself in, with, and through musics and, thereby, connecting with and through the peoples of the musics I find myself a traveler towards.
More, I look forward to leaning into these possibilities collectively and vulnerably with students, with and through musics that center: “a. people who make and listen to a specific kind of music for the values and human goods they obtain from doing so, or for the values ‘their music’ provides to others; b. the processes of musicing and listening (and dancing, worshipping, and so on) that the people of a specific musical praxis decide to use, develop, integrate, perpetuate, elaborate, change radically, and so forth; c. the products; and d. the contextual details (social, historical, cultural, spatial, visual) that caused a specific musical praxis to originate, develop, change over time, continue, or die out” (Elliott and Silverman 2015, 105).
Relatedly, and connected to such relational negotiations, I curiously wonder and hope the music education profession might consider asking and provisionally answering questions such as: how can multiple ways of knowing “pair up” in a networked way insofar as music teachers help students become curious about divergent, more inclusive, transdisciplinary (or de-disciplinary) ways of being musical? How can music education spaces and places protect and honor multiple ways of being musical while also celebrate the power and potency of a feminist networked solidarity towards openness, acceptance, and emancipation of all, even those beyond its immediate reach? How can music teaching and learning music otherwise (see Sofield and Edwards 2025)? Relatedly, do we, music teachers, ever find ourselves “submitting to” particular musics and pieces/songs out of duty or some other “obligation,” and if so, why? Are there some musical traditions we might query with as a way of mending injustices? Are there some musical traditions, ways of being, and musical wisdoms excluded from music teaching-and-learning spaces and are we—teachers and students—positioned well enough to curiously find ways to the “roots and routes” (Delpit 2006) of those musics?
Speaking of “traditions,” according to my read, feminist curiosity does not exist antithetical to music teachers’ and students’ developing relationships with musical traditions. As I’ve written elsewhere, some musical traditions evolve, progress, and advance, while some regress and fracture; some die out and disappear, while some survive and thrive (Elliott and Silverman 2017). Where feminist curiosity fits, here, would be to find teachers and students questioning the equitable (or the lack thereof) habits and habitats of musically relational processes within and across traditions. Who negotiates with specific musical traditions? And in what ways might these negotiations transpire? Negotiating depends on practitioners’ commitments to preserving (or not) traditions, or modifying them to greater and lesser degrees, creating hybrid traditions, and/or responding (or not) to a range of social, cultural, economic, political, gendered, educational, and other variables that constantly impact music makers, musical processes, and the circumstances of living and being (e.g., Elliott and Silverman 2015, 49–50, 229).
Traditions of musical praxes “are not static, unitary” objects; they exist as living, relational processes “and networked subjectivities” (Elliott and Silverman 2017, 145). In different musical praxes, some traditions and their associated beliefs, values, and principles might be considered “more seriously than others, and some might be more contested than others” (Elliott and Silverman 2017, 145). Musical praxes, and the nuances of the traditions they include, exist “in negotiation.” It seems to me that these negotiations mark the possibility of feminist curiosity; in negotiation, musicers, both teachers and students, “press into impossible futures, into the poetic present, and into a past that rumbles with buried knowings” (Zurn 2021b, 4).
Through relationships and negotiations, music teachers can help with the development of students’ musical knowings, doings, and beings. These living processes and negotiations act as a launching pad for new ways of thinking, doing, and being, and provide fertile ground for feminist curiosities to unfold through relational inquiry, through difference and connection, and can yield proximal understanding for possible discovery.
As D’Aoust (2020) states: “feminist curiosity is not only a tool to inquire about the world,” but also a positionality “that disrupts a world to make new ones into being” (151; italics in original). An ethos of feminist curiosity can help music teachers and students better listen to, listen with, and listen for stakeholders, past and present, with the hopes of building bridges that span across “age … and time and language and experience” (Zurn 2023, 67). And when feminist curiosity helps music teachers and students create new musical world(s), we are better poised to move against discrimination or erasure and rather honor “ambiguity, opacity, and intimacy” (Zurn 2021a). If teachers and students engage in such pursuits through music teaching and learning, we can assert that music education is moving towards being ethical. Still, I realize I have more questions than answers, and the wonder—hope-filled curiosity—I possess is simply one step towards reaching out for more equitable, musical, educational, emotional connections.
About the Author
Marissa Silverman is Professor at the John J. Cali School of Music, Montclair State University, NJ. A Fulbright Scholar, she is author of Gregory Haimovsky: A Pianist’s Odyssey to Freedom (University of Rochester Press, 2018), and co-author of Music Lesson Plans for Social Justice: A Contemporary Approach for Secondary School Teachers (Oxford University Press 2022) and the 2nd edition of Music Matters: A Philosophy of Music Education (OUP, 2015). She is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Feminism and Music Education (OUP 2025), Eudaimonia: Perspectives for Music Teaching and Learning (Routledge 2020), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical and Qualitative Assessment in Music Education (2019), Artistic Citizenship: Artistry, Social Responsibility, and Ethical Praxis (OUP 2016), and Community Music Today (Rowman &Littlefield 2013).
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Notes
[1] I share Popova’s full paragraph here, given its beauty, depth, and relevance: “‘Words belong to each other,’ Virginia Woolf rasped in the only surviving recording of her voice—a love letter to language as an instrument of thought and a medium of being. ‘Words are events, they do things, change things,’ Ursula K. Le Guin wrote a generation after her. To care about the etymologies of words is to care about the origins of the world’s story about itself. To broaden and deepen the meanings of words, to celebrate—as David Whyte did—‘their beautiful hidden and beckoning uncertainty,’ is to broaden and deepen life itself. It is of words that we build the two great pylons propping up our sense of reality: concepts and stories. Without the concept of a table, you would be staring blankly at the assemblage of incongruent surfaces and angles. Without arranging the facts and events of your life into a story—that narrative infrastructure of personhood—it would not be you looking out of your eyes. To know yourself is to tell a congruent story of who you are, a story in which your concept of yourself coheres even as it evolves. Without this central organizing principle of selfhood, life would be a continuous identity crisis.” (https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/11/15/the-dictionary-story/)
[2] https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/08/26/book-of-questions-pablo-neruda-paloma-valdivia/
[3] For more in the etymological nature of “curiosity” and its link to the Latin curiositas (from cura, care), see Papastephanou (2015, 2022) and
[4] For source on the etymology of “curiosity,” see https://www.etymonline.com/word/curiosity
[5] For discussion on artistic citizenship, which aligns with music education as/for activism, see Elliott (2012); Elliott, Silverman and Bowman (2016); Silverman and Elliott (2016); Westvall and Akuno (2024).
[6] See also Mulvey (1992) and Mulvey and Rogers (2015).
[7] See https://www.anothergaze.com/suddenly-woman-spectator-conversation-interview-feminism-laura-mulvey/
[8] See also Enloe (2000, 2015, 2019).
[9] See also Zurn and Bassett (2018; 2022) and Zurn and Shankar (2020).
[10] In his discussion on cripping curiosity, Zurn (2021a) states that “curiosity is not a new term for disability studies. It is used repeatedly to capture the objectification and enfreakment of people with disabilities” (150).
[11] Here, Zurn draws upon the work of Callahan (2006), Davies (2015), Nash (2014), Ndlovu (2011), and Gquola (2010) among others.
[12] Here, Zurn cites Edwards (2012), Kafer (2013), Zurn and Dilts (2016), among others and draws from the work of Martin Luther King, J. and Malcolm X.
[13] Here, Zurn cites Baglieri and Shapiro (2012), Clare (2015, 2017), Dowds and Phelan (2006), Johnson (2020), Kafer (2013), among others.
[14] Here, Zurn cites Aoki (2012), Halberstam (2018), Krieger (2011), Marvin (2020), Pitcher (2017), Spade (2015), Stryker (2008), Valerio (2006), among others.
[15] Here, Zurn cites Gabeba Baderoon, 2011, “Baartman and the Private,” 72.
[16] For an examination of “humility” within and across music education places and spaces, see Coppola (2025).
[17] This seems to resonate with Powell (2023).