Intra-active soundings: Becoming-woman, becoming-minor

This chapter explores the processes that give form to the identity of the woman composer, focusing on Boyd. A perennial problem for feminist theory has been how to break with the binary system of thought which conceives of man as the 'universal ground of reason and good thinking' and woman as the Other. The concept of identity is central to how people think and write about music. It functions as a boundary marker, distinguishing one kind of music from another, one genre or style from another, and one composer or performer from another. Since the mid-1990s, Boyd's musical aesthetic seems to have shifted. It is no longer, as it once was, predominantly based on a South East Asian aesthetic. The power of Boyd's music lies in its production of the multiplicity of relations in a multiplicity of time zones. The becomings opened up by Boyd's music potentially affirm change while engendering further becomings elsewhere.