Feminine endings : music, gender, and sexuality (McClary)

the history of western music is the history of contending with raced, classed, gendered struggle: 

“Throughout its history in the West, music has been an activity fought over bitterly in terms of gender identity. The charge that musicians or devotees of music are ‘effeminate’ goes back as far as recorded documentation about music, and music’s association with the body (in dance or for sensuous pleasure) and with subjectivity has led to its being relegated in many historical periods to what was understood as a ‘feminine’ realm. Male musicians have retaliated in a number of ways: by defining music as the most ideal (that is, the least physical) of the arts; by insisting emphatically on its ‘rational’ dimension; by laying claim to such presumably masculine virtues as objectivity, universality, and transcendence; by prohibiting actual female participation altogether…. For instance, Linda Austern and Richard Leppert have demonstrated that one reason the English have produced so little music is that they —more than their German or French neighbors —have long associated music strongly with effeminacy. The English effectively prevented themselves as a society from participating in musical culture, except as connoisseurs and consumers, and Anglo-Americans have followed suit” (17).

might we say, then, that there is an intense interplay between imagination and grounding [to return again to Menninghaus’s “politics of curtailment” following her reading of Kant], an interplay between release and regulation so that what we have in the Anglo-American tradition that is decidedly against the sorta black queerness that makes its economy go is a musical tradition of regulation itself. 

that is, there appears to be a philosophy of aversion that allows for the refusal of musical production: this aversion has to do with, i believe, raced, classed, gendered structures that sought to disempower.

Feminine endings : music, gender, and sexuality (McClary)

“I will argue throughout this volume that tonality itself—with its process of instilling expectations and subsequently withholding promised fulfillment until climax —is the principal musical means during the period from 1600 to 1900 for arousing and channeling desire” (12).

if this is the case, we can look at — that is, listen to — the music produced by someone like Henry “Box” Brown, music by the Fisk Jubilee Singers to hear how tonality constructs gender, if at all:

or, what are the tonal strategies of black musical/sonic production that was intentionally staged performance?

“BLACK ATLANTIC, QUEER ATLANTIC: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage” (Tinsley)

“Instead La Mar’s queerness churns silverly in her overflow, in the sealike capacity to desire beyond the brutality of history, nationality, enslavement, and immigration that she models for drowned shipmates and endangered yolamates. Neither disembodied metaphor nor oozing wound, her fluid desire becomes a resistant, creative praxis that, as Brand describes diasporic art, experiments with being ‘celebratory, even with the horrible,’ flowing together unexpected erotic linkages even, especially, in spaces of global violence and inequity. No matter what devastation she traverses La Mar keeps desiring, and this is the queer feeling that metaphorically and materially connects her to African diaspora immigrants past and present” (201-2).

question [#selfreminder]

• harlem renaissance & religion
• chicago writers & religion

the question:

other than baldwin, how do the other writers of the renaissance and black arts movement remember, discuss and critique religion? baldwin was rather conversant with holiness-pentecostalism; larsen had helga fall into a storefront church [and i need to find the piece written about storefronts and helga] — do writers engage or avert these spaces? i’m interested, of course, in the concept of aversion, so that Massumi’s writing about the perpetual connectivity of a concept as its residue, as its excess, is important for me.

“BLACK ATLANTIC, QUEER ATLANTIC: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage” (Tinsley)

“Yet regardless of whether intimate sexual contact took place between enslaved Africans in the Atlantic or after landing, relationships between shipmates read as queer relationships. Queer not in the sense of a “gay” or same-sex loving identity waiting to be excavated from the ocean floor but as a praxis of resistance. Queer in the sense of marking disruption to the violence of normative order and powerfully so: connecting in ways that commodified flesh was never supposed to, loving your own kind when your kind was supposed to cease to exist, forging interpersonal connections that counteract imperial desires for Africans’ living deaths. Reading for shipmates does not offer to clarify, to tell a documentable story of Atlantic, Caribbean, immigrant,or “gay” pasts.   Instead it disrupts provocatively. Fomented in Atlantic crosscurrents, black queerness itself becomes a crosscurrent through which to view hybrid, resistant subjectivities — opaquely, not transparently. Perhaps, as Brand writes, black queers really have no ancestry except the black water. But diving into this water stands to transform African diaspora scholarship in ways as surprising as Equiano’s first glimpse of the sea” (199).

YES!!!!

Revelation

najjustiz:

There was a big event at church last night. While I was there, I realized several things.

1) I need to fast more often.

2) I’m really good at giving men the benefit of a doubt. “I’m sure he feels so bad about what he did.” “I know he’s been to jail, but he’s got a good heart, I can tell.” But I need to tell myself more often that as gracious as I can be toward men, as much as I want them to reach their potential, God is more gracious toward me, and He wants me to reach my potential even more. “Men judge by outward appearances, but the Lord looks at the heart.”

3) Any day that I don’t write is a wasted day.

4) I am a Christian. A prayin’ “in the Spirit”, Bible believin’, tithing Christian. But I worry I’ll never “love” God so much that I don’t need a man.

particularly on point 4

i think christians tend to not actually get Jesus, and seem to be dismissive of the stories about how he lived in the world. jesus was a social person, if we can believe anything matthew, mark, luke and john wrote of him. jesus was all about being with people, talking to them, touching them, loving them: he particularly was about those marginalized folks whom others felt were not worthy of their time, their money, their energies [the pharisees and saducees are good examples]

so what i hope you consider is this: i don’t think God would ever want you to feel that you don’t need others, and if you are erotically attracted to men, i don’t think that God would want for you to feel a yearning and longing that should be dismissed. or: God doesn’t even think that God is enough [Christian doctrine, at least, teaches that God was “lonely” and decided to create] … so why should you? 

don’t feel bad.

“BLACK ATLANTIC, QUEER ATLANTIC: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage” (Tinsley)

“During the Middle Passage, as colonial chronicles, oral tradition, and anthropological studies tell us, captive African women created erotic bonds with other women in the sex-segregated holds, and captive African men created bonds with other men. In so doing, they resisted the commodification of their bought and sold bodies by feeling and feeling for their co-occupants on these ships” (192).