Sonic intimacies: performative erotics and African feminisms

Abstract

In this essay I explore the sensuous dimensions of intimacies and erotics in ethnographic field research conducted among the Dagara in northwestern Ghana. I argue that sensuous perception reveals aspects of ethnographic research that are frequently rendered inaudible, especially performative modes of expression. I theorize a conception of the erotic that moves beyond sexual activity, desire, and identity. This expansion of the erotic continuum opens up space to explore intimacy as produced through embodied knowledges. Through three sonic portraits, I demonstrate that sensuous perception is vital to understanding women’s shared intimacies and relationships. The indigenous materiality, ritual, and performative modes expressed in the portraits illuminate the myriad configurations of erotics as a source of power between women, even across identity categories. These everyday moments, the sonic intimacies that develop over time and in non-linear ways, they gesture to the performative, embodied, sensorial dimensions of ethnographic knowing, and they clarify gendered intimacies. These portraits suggest that the erotic is a manifestation of creative energy embedded in shared knowledge, history, and embodied expression such as dance, ritual, labor, and intimate gestures. By witnessing everyday sonic productions as transformative, we conceptually expand feminist praxis to be grounded in indigenous expressions, idioms, and ideologies.