Mapping the Blues Women from margin to centre: a critical engagement with refusal in the Blues Women's soundscape and landscape

This project theorises with the Blues Women epistemology by evaluating the agentic potential found in Black women blues musicians’ affective tools. More specifically, I use Sister Rosetta Tharpe as a theoretical case study for how the Blues Women were able to subvert their genre and exercise agency. This writing carefully investigates these subversions in the form of Tharpe’s soundscape (her musical choices) and landscape (the geography of her stage) through elements of Black feminist theory, such as sensorial protest and Black geographical thinking, illuminating the complexity of her affective choices like amalgamating different musical genre conventions and developing a new, spiritually informed star persona. Consequently, such analyses reveal the meaningful agentic potential found in these affective tools, as the Blues Women demonstrate a commitment to a politics of refusal in their creative choices, a practice that is central to the blues epistemology and genre. This project, therefore, posits the Blues Women as sophisticated meaning-makers in their ability to challenge defining aspects of the blues genre through affective appeals of bodily sensibilities like sound and staging. In going beyond traditional sites of knowledge production and methods of meaning-making, I assert that examining the contributions of the Blues Women also demands finding new ways to document agentic potential, such as through elements of radical feminist storytelling.