The triple themes of Performing Gender, Place, and Emotion in Music demonstratehow important it is to see the connectedness of different concepts of embodiment. These culturallyvariable terms of physicality and spirituality reach both inwardly toward the most intimate of humansensations or emotion and outwardly to larger environments of place and space. These studiesdemonstrate how social mediation occurs in relation to each of the three concepts, shaping behaviorsand expectations of how music, among other things, both represents and constitutes the ways that weare embodied, emplaced, and “emotioned.”

These chapters evoked memories and stories from my own work. In Canadian studies, I had at onepoint become interested in assertions about the gender of the nation-state as well as its provincesor regions. I thought of various contested but evocative images, including a number ofnineteenth-century political cartoons depicting Canada as the demure maiden next to a matronly womanrepresenting Britain, for instance (unlike the masculinist Uncle Sam imagery of the United States).I recalled Elspeth Probyn's argument that Quebec's mode of “outsidebelonging” positions it as gay within Canadian identity constructs, an argument thatchallenges the heterosexist “broken marriage” imagery that she saw in theprereferendum period of the early 1990s. Ian McKay's contention that Nova Scotia was imagedin the mid-twentieth century as a region of hardy males whose realm was the sea also came to mind.These images and interpretations are arguably strategic and intentional assertions—notnecessarily discursive formations that are culturally reinscribed and shared by large numbers ofpeople.