Abstract: This article narrates my sonic engagement with Suzan-Lori Parks’s little-known radio drama Loco-Motive (1991), a monologue about a woman who mysteriously grows a tail as she matures. I interpret Loco-Motive as a precursor to the racial, gendered, and bodily politics that Parks would revisit in her stage play Venus (1996). I ponder what possibilities for black performance lie in the aural experience of radio that cannot be expressed in the embodied, visual strategies that overwhelm contemporary theatrical representations of blackness. I develop a critical method of “listening darkly” to hear and describe the ways in which black femininity is constructed aurally through the acousmatic presence of the body.
Andie Berry (Fri,) studied this question.