Woman Sings Research Articles

Unsettling the return: Alternative curation and counterarchives

AbstractIn this article, we complicate the notion of sonic return in the context of postmillennial digital media technologies that have transformed how Indigenous people of the Bolivian Andes engage self‐reflectively with their own music and dance practices. We take a capacious approach to the notion of the archive and argue that these media interactions, where people make and circulate their own audiovisual materials, represent a space of counterarchival work. We consider our distinct and changing approaches to sound recordings in our respective fieldwork and highlight how media‐making agency has entered the hands of Indigenous actors. Notable here is a striking preference for the audiovisual over the solely audio, a preference that throws into relief the idea of the sound archive and its future. We point to alternative forms of audiovisual curation that may not be shaped to the ends foreign researchers might imagine, but that nevertheless might lead to more decolonized engagements of the future. We consider a video—created as part of a campaign for women's singing of Potosí to be legally recognized in heritage law—and explore how this seemingly outsider‐focused audiovisual production involved Indigenous people in its making, reception, and recursive recirculation. We approach these issues by drawing on our multidecade and cross‐disciplinary research trajectories in the Bolivian Andes and our more recent collaborative research on heritage lawmaking during the government of Evo Morales (2006–2019).

Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American LiteratureEmily J.Lordi. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013.

Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature Emily J. Lordi. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013.I thought I knew something about the history of music and artists like Mahalia Jackson and Bessie Smith; I thought I was well versed in the writings of Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin. I was wrong. Thankfully, Emily Lordi's brilliant Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature took me to school. Not only does the book expand one's understanding of a myriad of iconic writers and singers, chronicling their collaborative histories, but also it offers profound and important readings of their insurgent works and their voices of freedom.At its core, Black Resonance is an examination of the shared histories, overlapping cultural discourses, and interconnections between the sonic and literary, between the artist and the writer, between song and text. Ever since Bessie Smith's improbably powerful voice conspired with the emerging 'race records' industry to make her 'the first real superstar in African American popular culture,' writes Lordi, black writers have memorialized the sounds and detailed the politics of women's singing (1). Pushing back at the conventions that separate popular culture and high culture, activism and cultural production, intellectual musings and the sonic boom, Lordi, a professor of English at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, offers a series of examples that contest and undercut the binaries and boundaries that anchor discourses around culture.Challenging the myth of the muse and the privileging of certain forms of expression, Black Resonance moves the conversation about this history, a series of artists, and our collective discourse around art, agency, and activism. It is not simply interesting intersecting vectors between writers and artists or the ways that writers, from Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison to James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni, engaged the work of singers, from Bessie Smith and Mahalia Jackson to Billie Holiday and Aretha Franklin (and vice versa). According to the author, writers and singers are equal partners in the creation of aesthetics (5) and in the production and articulation of freedom Dreams (See Robin D. G. Kelley's Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, 2002). Lordi remarks thatI stage them as collaborators, in the etymological sense of 'laboring together,' as they develop analogous expressive techniques. It is necessary that they know each other, or that vocalists sing about writers, in order for writers and singers to collaborate in this way. Their collaboration is not literal; nor is it perfectly symmetrical. Writers discursively co-create musical meaning when they write about singers. (5)In a chapter on Ralph Ellison and Bessie Smith, Lordi highlights the dialectics operating with their work, and their deployed aesthetics, narratives, and tropes, challenging the discursive privileging of the white gaze and its flattening of their meanings. …

Halachic Multiculturalism in the IDF: Rulings of Official Religious Authorities in Israel Concerning Women's Singingg

This paper compares halakhic responsas regarding women's singing in IDF, and comes to conclusions about religion and army, religion and state, and women and religion.

Halachic Multiculturalism in the IDF: Rulings of Official Religious Authorities in Israel Concerning "Women's Singing"

Halachic Multiculturalism in the IDF: Rulings of Official Religious Authorities in Israel Concerning "Women's Singing"

When Women Play: The Relationship between Musical Instruments and Gender Style

In many societies, musical roles are divided along gender lines: women sing and men play. Men also sing and women sometimes play; yet, unlike men, women who play often do so in contexts of sexual and social marginality. This essay surveys the literature on women's use of musical instruments in a variety of social and cultural contexts and presents some contemporary anthropological theories regarding the interrelationship between social structure and gender stratification. The author concludes that women's use of musical instruments is related to broader issues of social and gender structure, and that changes in the ideology of these structures often reflect changes that affect women as performers.

New Girl in Town

New Girl in Town

Dancing for the Dead: Funeral Strippers in Taiwan dir. by Marc L. Moskowitz (review)

126 Journal of Chinese Religions Dancing for the Dead: Funeral Strippers in Taiwan Directed by MARC L. MOSKOWITZ. Columbia, SC: Daunting Head Productions, 2011. 38 min., high definition color DVD. Chinese and English with English subtitles. US$19.95. In the 1980s, “electric flower cars” (dianzi hua che 電子花車) became a common part of Taiwanese funeral processions, weddings, and temple festivals. These brightly decorated cars feature stages at the back on which scantily clad young women sing, perform erotic dances, and occasionally strip. Dancing for the Dead is the first documentary film which focuses on the phenomenon of electric flower cars, contextualizing the seemingly paradoxical mix of religion and pornography within the history of innovation in Taiwanese folk religious practice and global consumer capitalism. The film is designed for teaching undergraduates who are unfamiliar with Taiwan, and would be suitable for classes in comparative religion, anthropology, Chinese/Taiwanese studies, and gender studies. Dancing for the Dead presents footage of historical and contemporary Taiwanese religious festivals, including both electric flower car performances and other types of temple festival performance, as well as interviews with electric flower car performers, troupe managers, and local scholars. Background is provided through the narration and shots of daily life in urban Taiwan. The film accomplishes one of the basic goals of ethnography, making a seemingly exotic practice comprehensible, by allowing the interviewees to explain some of the basic beliefs that underlie it—that gods, ghosts, and ancestors have the same desires for entertainment as living people, and that a “hot and noisy” (re’nao 熱鬧) atmosphere is highly valued and seen as the sign of a successful event. At the same time, the diversity of Taiwanese attitudes towards the use of erotic dancing in religious events is presented; we hear from a government official who wants to regulate “unhealthy” performances at temple festivals as well as a well-known (former) flower car dancer who explains the discipline and artistry that characterize her “honorable” profession. The issue of the sexualization of young women is contextualized through a history of the increasing visibility of the female body in the Taiwanese entertainment industry. This includes both a discussion of how temple festival performances other than electric flower cars tend to be gendered, with shots of both the martial, sometimes bloody performances of men and the delicate “national dance” style performed by teams of women. Director/narrator Marc Moskowitz also notes how the sexualized female body has become a taken-for-granted staple of advertising and television programming in Taiwan, as in many other contemporary capitalist societies. The film is quite short, and makes its points clearly. It would serve as an excellent conversation starter in undergraduate classes. But there are many images which will no doubt leave students with questions, so it should probably not be taught in isolation. The film gives a good feel for the sights and sounds of Taiwanese folk religious festivals, family rituals, and Book Reviews 127 urban street life, and a teacher could take discussion in a number of directions. Here I would like to suggest some ways in which the film might be supplemented to facilitate discussion on different topics. Electric flower cars are associated almost exclusively, in their religious context, with “folk religion.” Moskowitz explains that Taiwanese folk religion combines the worship of Daoist and Buddhist deities, and emphasizes the historical tradition of constant innovation in folk religious practice. Several of the interviewees note that electric flower cars are often used in the worship of “low,” or yin (陰) gods, and that the practice is often associated with the subculture of triads. For students unfamiliar with Chinese folk religion, some further information on the place of folk religion in Taiwan, in relation to more organized, text-based religions such as Buddhism, Daoism, and Christianity might be useful. Folk religion has been strongly associated with Hoklo (福佬 / 河洛 / 鶴佬) ethnic identity in Taiwan, in opposition to a pan-Chinese identity, and it might be interesting for students to see how the image of the electric flower car has changed from the 1990s, when it was often used by Taiwanese novelists and film directors as a symbol of the decline of “authentic” Hoklo culture, to the early 21st century, when...

In Touch with the Earth? Musical Instruments, Gender and Fertility in the Bolivian Andes

This essay discusses beliefs and practices concerning gender, musical instruments and vocal performance in rural communities of northern Potosi′, in the Bolivian Andes. While instrumental performance is a male preserve, critical to the construction and expression of manhood, it is also argued that much value is ascribed to women's singing and creation of song poetry. It is further suggested that women's exclusion from instrumental performance should not necessarily be understood in terms of subordination, but approached within broader models and contexts of gender relations. This involves exploring gendered aspects of fertility, llama husbandry, seasonality, the cosmos and the landscape, leading to an examination of courtship, androgyny, notions of ‘marked’ and ‘unmarked’ gender, and the possibility of multiple gender and degrees of gendering.

Sung birds: music, nature, and poetry in the later Middle Ages

Is birdsong music? The most frequent answer to this question in the Middle Ages was resoundingly no. In Sung Birds, Elizabeth Eva Leach traces postmedieval uses of birdsong within Western musical culture. She first explains why such melodious sound was not music for medieval thinkers and then goes on to consider the ontology of music, the significance of comparisons between singers and birds, and the relationship between art and nature as enacted by the musical performance of late-medieval poetry. If birdsong was not music, how should we interpret the musical depiction of birdsong in human music-making? What does it tell us about the singers, their listeners, and the moral status of secular polyphony? Why was it the fourteenth century that saw the beginnings of this practice, continued to this day in the music of Messiaen and others?Leach explores medieval arguments about song, language, and rationality whose basic terms survive undiminished into the present. She considers not only lyrics that have their singers voice the songs or speech of birds but also those that represent other natural, nonmusical, sounds such as human cries or the barks of dogs. The dangerous sweetness of birdsong was invoked in discussions of musical ethics, which, because of the potential slippage between irrational beast and less rational woman in comparisons with rational human masculinity, depict women's singing as less than fully human. Leach's argument comes full circle with the advent of sound recording. This technological revolution-like its medieval equivalent, the invention of the music book-once again made the relationship between music and nature an acute preoccupation of Western culture.

Book Review: Muslim Women Sing: Hausa Popular Song

Book Review: Muslim Women Sing: Hausa Popular Song

Fairy Tales and Feminist Discursive Analysis: Can You Hear Women Singing?

Fairy Tales and Feminist Discursive Analysis: Can You Hear Women Singing?

Muslim women sing: Hausa popular song

Part 1. The Singers and Their World 1. Every Woman Sings Profile One: Hauwa Gwaram, Hausa Poet 2. The Song Is Poetry's Domain: Tradition and Islam Profile Two: Hajiya Har Shehu, Hausa Poet 3. Performing Artists: Poets and Singers Profile Three: Maizargadi, Praise Singer in the Royal Court of Kano 4. Metaphor Profile Four: Hajiya Faji and Hauwa Mai Duala, Hausa Singers 5. The Social Functions of Hausa Women's Creativity Profile Five: Barmani Maimuna Choge and Binta Katsina, Hausa Singers 6. Oral and Written Hausa Poetry Part 2: Songs and Poems

'We Sang Ourselves Through That War': Women, Music and Factory Work in World War Two

This paper examines the role of music in women's experience of factory work in the Second World War — an important topic but one largely overlooked in the existing literature. Two important forms of music flourished in war factories — the relaying of Music While You Work through loudspeakers, and the collective singing of workgroups. Drawing on a range of sources, the paper shows that music served to both express and create community in the workplace, and came to be seen as an anthropological necessity for survival in the context of exposure to repetitive and monotonous labour. The music also expressed a complex mix of simultaneous accommodation and resistance to women's position in munitions factory production. A key motif in women's musical cultures was autonomy, suggesting important continuities with the autonomous texture of other shopfloor cultures in Britain in the middle of the twentieth century. The widespread nature of women's singing also has important implications for how we understand the hist...

Book Review: Preacher Woman Sings the Blues: The Autobiographies of Nineteenth-Century African American Evangelists

By Richard J. Douglass-Chin. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. ISBN 0-8262-1311-1. Pp. ix + 228. $34.95. Richard J. Douglass-Chin has written an important, albeit uneven, book on origins of African American women's spiritual autobiography. Certain to appeal broadly to students of African American history, literature, and culture, Preacher Woman Sings Blues: The Autobiographies of Nineteenth-Century African American Evangelists joins a number of recent works on awesome mystique of spiritual in black women's writings. Eight of thirteen writers examined in this detailed chronological study published texts before 1900: Jarena Lee and Zilpha Elaw (chapter two); Sojourner Truth, Rebecca Cox Jackson, and Julia A. J. Foote (respectively, chapters three through rive); Amanda B. Smith, Elizabeth Broughton, and Virginia Broughton (chapter six). The life history of a ninth woman, Belinda, stolen into bondage, forms subject of chapter one, its title (The Cruelty of Men Whose Faces Were Like Moon) taken from African native's 1787 legal petition for reparations for involuntary labor. At chapter seven Preacher Woman pivots into twentieth-century African American women's literature by examining Zora Neale Hurston's acknowledgments and transformations of sacred-blues black traditions of modern novelist's literary foremothers. The eighth chapter reads invocation and deployment of spirituality in recent novels by Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and late Toni Cade Bambara. Specifically, book attends to oppositional discourses that emerge at intersection of ecstasy, orality, Western literacy, and African expressivity. Douglass-Chin cogently combines analyses of blessed and blues to reclaim evangelist as a folk signifier and to ameliorate its definition so that the evangelists may all be seen as blues `bad' women [...] cut from a more pious cloth than their secular singing sisters (10). Too frequently Preacher Woman drops thread of blues matron and blues matrix as method and trope. However, a more urgent problem undermines Douglass-Chin's achievement: his study misrepresents primacy of sentimentalism as deployed by both African- and Anglo-American women in nineteenth century. It appears that Douglass-Chin perceives early black women's blues to be at odds with sentimentality. Indeed, Douglass-Chin insufficiently recognizes sentimental strategies, contending in introduction that, refusing to employ sentimental form and content of so many nineteenth-century women's texts, majority of black female evangelists' works were ignored and bypassed on literary market and simply fell out of circulation (14; my emphasis). The relatively brief shelf life of most black holy women's writings, however, had more to do with poverty, illiteracy, and fallacies about black and female intelligence--all institutionalized by white patriarchy--than with their authors' failure to conform to sentimental conventions of more lucrative narratives. Moreover, rhetoric of one Baptist missionary's autobiography, The Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince (not cited in Preacher Woman) discloses deep ambivalence about propriety of sentimentalizing black life. Significantly, Prince's Life first appeared in 1850 and was reissued at least twice--in 1853 and 1856. As such, it is representative of black women's spiritual texts. An apparent bias against sentimentalism undercuts Preacher Woman most conspicuously in chapter rive, in which Douglass-Chin misreads Foote's combined engagement and subversion of sentimental pedagogy in A Brand Plucked from Fire. Because Preacher Woman glaringly omits recent scholarship on role of sacred in early American sentimentalism, it cannot elucidate thirteen authors' codification of Christian morality and theology in sentimental terms. …

Preacher Woman Sings the Blues: The Autobiographies of Nineteenth-Century African American Evangelists; Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives of Nineteenth-Century African American Women

Preacher Woman Sings the Blues: The Autobiographies of Nineteenth-Century African American Evangelists; Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives of Nineteenth-Century African American Women

Purchasing Praise: Women, Dancing, and Patronage in Malawi Party Politics

Political parties in contemporary Malawi organize their female members to dance and sing songs of praise at their public functions. One of the characteristics of the political environment that produces women's praise singing and dancing in Malawi is the unequal relationship between politicians and the people they lead, which can generally be characterized as patron-client. Politicians enact their roles as patrons at public functions by giving material gifts to women performers, giving them an incentive to join the party, dance in its service, and ultimately vote for its politicians. This article explores the institution of women's political praise dancing and singing in Malawi party politics, especially during the campaigning for the second multiparty elections that took place in 1999. I situate this practice within the context of patron-client relationships and question whether women are acting as conscious agents when they dance or whether they are strategically manipulated and exploited by politicians.

We'll be in your mountains, we'll be in your songs: a Navajo woman sings

We'll be in your mountains, we'll be in your songs: a Navajo woman sings

Body politics and the fictional double

Contents Introduction: Body Fictions, by Debra Walker King 1. Who Says an Older Woman Can't/Shouldn't Dance? Gloria Wade-Gayles 2. When Body Politics of Partial Identifications Collide with Multiple Identities of Real Academics: Limited Understandings of Research and Truncated Collegial Interactions Sue V. Rosser 3. Body Language: Corporeal Semiotics, Literary Resistance Maude Hines 4. Writing in Red Ink Debra Walker King 5. Myths and Monsters: The Female Body as the Site for Political Agendas S. Yumiko Hulvey 6. Agency and Ambivalence: A Reading of Works by Coco Fusco Caroline Vercoe 7. Performing Bodies, Performing Culture: An interview with Coco Fusco and Nao Bustamante Rosemary Weatherston 8. Women Singing, Women Gesturing: The Gendered and Racially-Coded Body of Music Video Maureen Turim 9. Bombshell Stephanie A. Smith Afterword: The Unbroken Circle of Assumptions Trudier Harris Notes Selected Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index

Rebellion and Tradition in Ana Castillo's So Far From God and Sylvia Lopez-Medina's Cantora

The Chicana voice in literature, according Ramon Saldivar, comprises a discourse that creates instructive alternative the exclusively phallocentric subject of contemporary Chicano (175). As Cordelia Chavez Candelaria reports, Chicana/ Latina and other women writers have struggled for centuries attain the right to express and assert the validity of woman-space and the textured zone of women's experience (26). Over the last two decades, the body of work that Chicana novelists have contributed the totality of Chicano artistic discourse has managed expand the formally predominant socio-political themes of the text so that it now includes the politics of gender. In the process, the Chicana novel has appropriated topics considered taboo in Latino culture: physical and sexual abuse, and heterosexual and lesbian sexuality (Arias and Gonzales-Berry 649). This new discourse is rebellious and can at times become very subversive. Its exploration of previously censored areas holds up an unforgiving mirror the patriarchal practices of Chicano/Latino culture. Alvina Quintana asserts, while referring directly Ana Castillo's writings, that the Chicana feminist is interested in scrutinizing the assumptions that root her own cultural influences, unpacking so called traditions and political institutions that shape patriarchal ways of seeing (The Novelist 74). Although most Chicana novelists address similar feminist preoccupations in their writings, they employ vastly different discursive strategies in their narratives. They may tell similar stories, but the form, vision, and tone with which they approach their objective reflect the heterogeneity that exists in the Chicana novel. Evidence of this difference arises when we compare Ana Castillo's So Far From God (1994) and Sylvia Lopez-Medina's Cantora (1993). Both works tell of the losses and hardships in the lives of the female characters, and of how these women find the strength survive. Nevertheless, the discourses that Castillo and Lopez-Medina employ reside at opposite ends of the narrative spectrum. So Far From God is a novel that incites rebellion against the norms and values of Chicano patriarchal society while Cantora, although calling for changes, always does so within a framework that respects centuries' worth of traditions and cultural beliefs. This essay compares the importance that naming, gender relations, and religion play in the development of the female characters. It also examines how the novelistic discourse of Castillo and Lopez-Medina either calls for rebellion or demonstrates a deep respect for tradition. In Women Singing in the Snow, Tey Diana Rebolledo recognizes the importance that naming plays in the struggle for interpretive power. A central concept in marginalized American cultures, naming describes and therefore expresses the identity of the named. Under patriarchy, naming constitutes a tool of domination through its power symbolically confine the named within the parameters of an imposed gender identity. Naming, however, can also function as a tool for empowering self-definition, a means by which redefine women's identity and reject imposed descriptions of the self. Rebolledo states that Chicanas are very much engaged in an articulation of accurate naming and the acceptance of all the cultural and social premises that lie behind the `names' (103). Ana Castillo's So Far From God reflects the positive dynamics of naming. The novel has Sofia, the embodiment of wisdom, at its core, a mother who survives the death of her four daughters: Esperanza, Fe, Caridad, and La Loca. The names of the first three daughters denote the three major Christian ideals. However, in the cruelest of ironies, the destiny of each of these characters is the antithesis of the ideal the name represents. Esperanza, the most liberated of the sisters, devotes the energy of her college years the Chicano Movement. …

Tales from the Walled City: Aesthetics of Political Prison Culture in Post-War Greece

The grandmothers, as they are called—elderly women imprisoned for refusing to testify against their children regarding their resistance involvement—sit on the stone steps leading to the upper floors of the prison and learn from other prisoners how to read, write, and count. They are among the estimated 70 percent of illiterate Greek women at mid-century, and the plan is to reach full literacy within the prison. “I'm learning so I can write about the history of my village during the Albanian war, the resistance, the German occupation, and the civil war. How and why our children were forced to take up arms again and head for the mountains . . . I know this history well because I helped both in Albania and in the resistance,” says Maria Zoga. She has lost two sons, one killed by the Nazis and the other by “Greek fascists.” “My son Stamatis wanted me to learn to read and write. And I will learn, I will learn. I've just started to read,” says Violeta Tsamoutalidou. Stamatis, a communist and member of the resistance, was tortured at the police station and killed during an alleged escape attempt in 1948. “Teach me to read and to count,” says Grannie Regina. “Now that I've lost my husband and I'm by myself, who will count the grains?” The grandmothers scattered about the prison “learning letters” and taking life on their own terms is a prominent theme in the accounts of political prisoners.See Papadouka (1981:36–39). The Averoff Women's Singing Group, formed during the 1940s, sang and continued to perform the song, “The Grandmothers Learn Letters” into the 1980s. Its lyrics depict this peculiar pedagogy: “The grannies are bent over, with their eyeglasses/They are learning their ABC's and yet their hair is white as snow./The grandmothers hold their pencils and paper and write slowly/Their first letters will be sent to their grandchildren, who will receive them with joy./And if in their old age, many problems weigh on their hearts/Closed up just like the young inside the prison, they are learning to read and write./Spreading their gentle caresses among us, they remember the old days/Our every storm, they weathered first, and they put glasses on us.”