The Holiness of a Moan: Moaning Music, Publication Alert!
Quiet! Quiet! A Black pastor said a few years ago to a Black woman moaning during worship to stop, get her attention, and get the service back on track. The video went viral, eliciting a diverse range of responses.
Moaning is part of the aesthetic of Black church tradition for those who are familiar with Black spiritual practice and liturgy. I honored this woman, who was moaning like many, and asked myself whether the pastor could have found another way to regain her attention instead of what appears to be publicly scolding her. Moaning has many forms, but groaning, which this woman was doing, is the most studied.
What are the various ways that African female artists practice pleasure in performance, aesthetics, lyrics, sounds, movement, words, and visuals, among many other ways? What purpose does it serve?
In this paper, I insist that the moaning in music is a poetics and politics of resistance to the masculinization of lyrics, invisibility, and heteronormativity. Furthermore, it is a form of the politics of redress, riffing off of Saidiya Hartman. Hartman argues that, despite the horror of the antebellum era in the United States, enslaved people used pleasure and performance as a site to express agency and resistance. While the experiences of African women on the continent differ from those of Black women in the diaspora, they converge in how racial logic and epithets influenced colonial gendered biopolitics. I argue that moaning also serves as a way to write against the racialized notion of what it means to be African, female, and queer.
Thus, moaning is the way we fully express our essence in resistance to systems, structures, and societies that want us to live otherwise.
In this paper, I expanded the understanding of moaning expressions to include the diverse ways we experience pleasure that is both erotic and non-sexual, as well as sensual and more.
I would have said the artists demonstrated agency, but that glosses over the subjugation, denigration, and violations and degradation that make agency necessary.
Moaning aims to challenge the scholarly typecast of objectification and sexualization, which limits broader inquiry into other ways to examine the expressivity of African women's pleasures, passion, and playfulness.
My new bread is published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies.
Free access using this link for the next 30 days
I am thankful to the journal for making its outlet a home for my work and to the reviewers for encouraging me to refine this idea further.
This is merely a glimpse into my second PhD dissertation, titled “Lyric is Male: Gender, Sexuality, and Queerness in an African Soundscape.
