Dancing the River: Fluidity of Eros and Gender in Music and Dance of African Diasporic Spiritual Traditions

The ideas presented in this paper, inspired by poet Audre Lorde's lines, “I will become myself an incantation, dark, raucous, many-shaped,” explore sacred performative roles and elements associated with gender/sexual diversity, including transgender behavior and same-sex eroticism in African-Atlantic religions, as practiced at the crossroads of American multicultural communities. These linkages interweave to form a tapestry of queer-cultural, including religious and aesthetic, categories (or “domains”). Among these categories are: spiritual forces or deities (orisha) having multiple, including queer, caminos (roads); music/song texts and dances/gestures performed in a ritual context that speak to diversity and fluidity of gender and sexuality; the embodiment of spiritual forces in “possession” or enthusiastic trance by which the initiated convey gendered and sexed behaviors and identities that may correspond to or contest those they inhabit in everyday life.