Ecstatic loneliness

Black genders and the politics of affect in Mykki Blanco's 'Loner

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4366990
AutoresW Henry Mosley (0000-0002-4835-193X, Wake Forest University, North Carolina, USA, autor de correspondencia)
Año2022
Volumen23
Número1
Páginas76-92
Fecha de publicación2022-04-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaFeminist Theory (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1464-7001 • E-ISSN: 1741-2773
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/14647001211062744
OpenAlexW4213251630
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas2
Referencias citadas21

The rapper Mykki Blanco is lauded as a trailblazer in the contemporary queer hip hop movement, and it is this reputation that, in part, makes the single of her debut album so curious. The song 'Loner' is unequivocally pop and explores health, loneliness, love and sex, echoing Blanco's shifting relationship to gender, genre, sobriety and serostatus. Amidst three key performances of this song, Blanco's consciousness was at various stages of development and they reflect her journey into trans womanhood and through HIV seroconversion. As such, her relationship to gender and disability comes in and out of focus as the legibility of her art and affect jockey across black gay, gender fluid and trans modes of self-determination. This confluence of Blanco's affect, genders, music and performances leads to certain questions. What constellates loneliness during a black trans process of becoming? What collateral genealogies and intellectual and expressive cultural formations come to bear on the affective attachments of black queer, trans, feminist art? In this article, I offer an account of the antagonistic relationship between (white) affect studies and black studies in order to contextualise the stakes of thinking affect alongside gender and race. I also forward a theory of ecstatic loneliness which attends to the ways in which anti-blackness, HIV stigma and transphobia produce negative affects that function as the basis for imagining a trans-inclusive care practice that is empathetic to the experience of seroconversion. Through analysis of three performances of 'Loner', I find that wayward commitments to gender lead to various emplacements of the song in black cisgender, transgender and gender-fluid discourses of affect, community and performance, resulting in an interdisciplinary method of black and queer self-making that is underexamined in affect studies scholarship

Affect theory · Feeling · Loneliness · Politics · Queer · Sociology · Gender Studies · Music History and Culture · Participatory Visual Research Methods · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Psychology · Social Psychology