Northwestern University's Center for Global Culture and Communication Conference

I'll be presenting a paper at a conference titled "Performance and Excess" given by Northwestern University's Center for Global Culture and Communication...below is the text from my paper proposal...to whet the appetitite, so to speak...comments are welcome, questions are encouraged...

Hearing Circum-Stance Performances

He touched me, He touched me / and oh the joy that
floods my soul
Something happened, and now I know / He touched me
and made me whole
- William J. Gaither

Of late, my writing has focused on what I call the "circum-religious performance of queer(ed) identity." This performance takes place "along the rim" – a continual cyclical navigation wherein the body takes particular ideological and physical stances in particular locations. One location I theorize is the black gay club as the ideological and physical place of overt demonstrations of non-normative sexuality and gender expression. I theorize "the Black Church" as the ideological and physical place that requires compulsory repression of that expressiveness or, at the very least, professes and posits heteronormativity as that towards which all individuals should aspire. This space causes many queer(ed) individuals to perform subversive acts and comportments to skirt perceived deviance.

Queer theorist E. Patrick Johnson discusses dancing in the dark place of the black gay club to the rhythms and rhymes of Black Gospel Music as particularly helpful for black queer(ed) individuals.[1] Simply: he believes that queer(ed) black bodies dancing to gospel music in the gay club is an occasion for a unique and dissident unification of body and soul for abjectified, objectified and vilified queer(ed) individuals. As I am interested in an analysis of some possibilities for how the space of a black gay club performs in concert with and at other times against black queer(ed) subjects, in this exploration I am attempting to tease out how sound festers within these multi-modal performances and how sound becomes substance – how it materializes – through circum-religious performances. I rely heavily on Fred Moten's introductory chapter, "Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester's Scream" in In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition.[2] Similar to Moten, I want to find the "convergence of blackness [and queer(ed)ness] and the irreducible sound of necessarily visual performance at the scene of objection."[3] The scenes of objection, or subjection,[4] that I will recount in this writing are what I posit as the circum-stances of queer(ed) identity.

Along the circum-religious rim, I hypothesize that the varied comportments of black queer(ed) individuals is created through "circum-stance" along the "vortextual" rim. By this, I mean that along the rim, there are particular and peculiar ways that the queer(ed) subject stands, postures, or "strikes a pose." The word stance also connotes mental and emotional processes, when one takes a position or appropriates an idea. I use "vortextual" as I believe the performance of queer(ed) identity along the rim continually focuses on (mis)readings of the body. Throughout, I attempt to use psychoanalytic theory as a means to "read" circum-religious performance by analyzing bodies cut and penetrated by gospel music, bodies wherein theological sound and material lodged within them evince through the body's movement either as acts of contestation, reverence or both.[5]

What occurs when the gospel message, through song, not only touches but also enters the body and has the propensity to make the body whole (or antithetically, damaged)? I believe this analysis can gesture towards a fecund hearing of how dissent and displacement, abjection and objection sound through circum-religious performances. Audible productions occur otherwise than just voice. In a Black Church context, meaningful sound can encompass whimpers, cries, shrieks, hollers, shuffling feet, the mms and hmms, laughing and hands clapping – the wordless reaches of sound. Audible productions can act as liberatory and/or immuring concurrently. I argue that for queer(ed) black subjects, phonic materiality of the Black Church appear to issue from the physical, emotional and spiritual positionality – the circum-stance – with the propensity to cause trauma. Simply, the continual production of sound along the rim, demonstrated by how the body moves, can be terrifying. I think it a worthwhile exercise to ask what music breaking through and residing in the body, in the liminality of the flesh does to the queer(ed) subject when the messages are deemed homophobic, patriarchal and/or sexist.

Notes
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[1] E. Patrick Johnson, "Feeling the Spirit in the Dark: Expanding Notions of the Sacred in the African-American Gay Community," Callaloo 21, no. 2 (1998).
[2] Fred Moten, In the Break : The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
[3] Ibid., 1.
[4] This statement, "scenes of subjection" is my gesturing towards what has been foundational for my work found in Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection : Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, Race and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
[5] Here, I do not want to argue that penetration is wholly negative or degrading, as is generally believed with regard to queer(ed) sex, particularly anal. In fact, penetrative acts can be pleasurable and even this is evident in bodies that are cut or penetrated with music.