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Querying/Queering
1920s Blues Texts: Or, Whatever Happened to the ‘B.D.’
Woman?
Lorna
Wheeler
Department
of English
Metropolitan
State College of Denver
(Estados
Unidos)
“I love the blues…they’re
so seditious…I don’t care what they’re talking about—the
subtexts is always about sex.” Sonya Sanchez, 2005 This
epigraph by Sonia Sanchez draws on a long tradition of
thinking of the blues as veiling raucously sexual and
subversive content, but the sex exulted in the blues is
almost exclusively heterosexual and mainstream.
In this talk, I will
introduce the work of little-known blues woman Lucille
Bogan, an artist who resisted the normative in no
uncertain terms. As a result of Bogan’s sex-positive and
queer-themed lyrics, her story has heretofore been lost to
the Harlem Renaissance cultural/literary tradition. In her
blues, Bogan unflinchingly explodes a well-guarded
attachment to hetero-normative sexual practices.
Indeed, in the world of
Bogan’s blues, nothing is held sacred and little is
coded. Whether Bogan is refashioning a whore’s apology
to a boast about “craving” her wares or envisioning a
queer world where pronouns are not sutured to sexual
identity, her blues unabashedly speak the non-regulated
erotic. Recovering and assessing Bogan’s work is
critical to a more nuanced study of the Harlem
Renaissance.
About Lorna
Wheeler
Dr. Lorna Wheeler teaches
African American Literature and Queer Literature and
Criticism at Metropolitan State College of Denver. She has
published several essays on queer black women writers and
is currently finishing an essay on Angelina Weld Grimke
and the Heterotopic Closet for a special issue on "Queer
Space" for English Language Notes, a journal produced
by the University of Colorado at Boulder.
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