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Blackqueer aesthesis Sexuality and the rumor and Gossip of Black Gospel Ashon T. Crawley in this essay i consider the sound of religious music in relation to a sociosexual understanding of queerness as nonnormative, resistant, and utopist. influenced by aesthetic and sound studies, this essay investigates the relation of aurality to subject formation and personhood that both anticipates and escapes subjection (Moten 2003, 1). in the notational devices of Western music, harmony is graphed through the treble and the bass clefs. Clefs indicate register and pitch for notes. But more than that, on a written score, the clefs reference space—intervality, proximity, closeness, nearness—between notes. Thus, it seems that the clef announces, by way of representational arrest on the page, the capacity of sound to hold space and time, intervality and temporality, or what we might simply call spatiotemporality. it is in the spatiotemporality that, i will argue, rhetorics circulate, curiously revising the past in the present. This is true for the well-circulated, un(der)documented secret: the idea that most black men who perform gospel music are gay. This idea has found much currency: in fictional accounts by writers like James Baldwin, in movies like First Sunday, and in churches by pastors and preachers who openly call out—with the desired response of laughter—“dykes,” “bull-daggers,” and “sissies” in the choir and in the missionary departments.1 When gossip and rumor are shared, what cultural histories are performed, contested, and calibrated by demarcating who is and who is not acceptable by way of this sound? Gossip and rumor circulate regarding the spectacular sexualities, the abject lives of the “church queens,” creating a narrative form through which certain figures crystallize. The narrative, like the musical score, is arresting, attempting to represent the always-abundant excessiveness of performance. The narrative seeks seizure of queer aesthetics, though this queering narrative exists 28 / Ashon T. Crawley previous to action.2 This narrative is both foundational for the bodying forth of a certain type of abject, queer subject and functional for a certain mode of resistance. The black queer subject is thrown into a narrative as irreducible incoherence while he concurrently grounds a narrative of black, Christian normativity. rumor and gossip—as narrative—are a technology of queering potentiality. i use the term queering intentionally to speak to the nonnormativity and indexing of difference that “queer” announces. Queering is a verb and, by way of narrativizing, anyone can be queered if they occupy a certain socio-sonic space. other works think about queerness with relation to blackness and religiosity, such as Marlon Moore’s (2008) argument foregrounding the performance of various masculinities between preacher and musician in black churches. Though i am writing about male-identified persons, i am interested in the various constructions and narratives around voice that is related but not reducible to body. Bodies matter, we might say, but differently based on the enunciative voice. Charles nero (2005) attempts to “queer” W. e. B. duBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, which begins with a hum in the short story “The Coming of John”; that hum allows nero to think about the turn of twentiethcentury discourses about gender inversion and film. he relates the sound of a hum to a possible splitting of a subject that yields a duality and inversion— a queering. While i am similarly interested in the production of sound, i am hoping to linger in the materiality of sound that literally emanates—and is not split off from—individuals. it appears that in black churches,3 peculiar sexualities suture to aurality and then converge on particular bodies. But more than converging on bodies through the circumscribing, voyeuristic imaginings of others, aurality and sexuality are compressed, as it were, in the bodies and literally sound out of them. The antitheses of gossip and rumor are not truth and honesty, in my view, but rather a noise, a particular type of overt announcement that everyone can hear, that is not hushed. That is to say, gossip and rumor are not always merely lies; at times the sound of the voice functions as the narrative confirmation. Sissies singing in sanctuaries on Sundays and sinning in secret societies on Saturdays serve an important purpose in congregations. The sound created by these imagined queer subjects create the sonic background, the soundtrack, upon which the holy can be realized during a church service. The circulation of rumor and gossip and concurrent repudiation of those abject persons who create those ever...

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