Make Me Sweat
Sweat, blackness, gender, performance and labour
Back in 2016, I’d returned from running around South America for four months with only an overdraft to my name. So, I got a job in a pub down the road from me. I’d worked in hospitality before but this place was a new type of hell. The more you chain smoked the more breaks you were given, albeit on a rickety chair by the industrial bins. The clientele was either enthusiastic Tinder dates or sort of posh people who were sort of okay with being posh and rude. The only time my cortisol levels weren’t through the roof, was when I was on an early shift polishing cutlery and refilling the sauce bottles.
On one particularly ghastly night in the summer, the pub was heaving, and I was flagging. I was serving some guy a pint, and he kept staring at me. He paid, then beckoned my colleague over and whispered something into his ear. They both slowly turned to look at me, then he walked off. “He just wanted me to tell you, you’ve got sweat on your top lip.” Here I was thinking this man had slipped his digits over and I’d have to politely decline his advancements, but no. I was so shocked that I’d been so unceremoniously handed out a S.U.L.A (sweaty upper lip alert) in real life that I couldn’t even conjure up a cutting reply. “It’s hot,” I blurted out pathetically, wiping my face.
But the rage was rising in me like bile. I wanted to throw a drink over both of them. I’d been on my feet for hours, hungry, thirsty, serving the worst kind of people and it was boiling. I am a face sweater. Shoot me. The second we get above 20 degrees, or I do any form of vigorous movement, my face is going to be drenched. And it irked me even more that this black man, a stranger, told a white guy, my colleague, that my perspiration embarrassed him so much that I needed to do something about it. I was already working in an environment where there were more black people serving behind the bar than there were black customers being served, where was the solidarity?
I’ve often thought about that encounter over the eight years since it happened and what he meant by it. Why was he so fixated on my sweat? What was so wrong about my body’s natural response to keeping me cool? Was I meant to be thankful he told more like it was a spinach-in-teeth faux pas? Anyway, of course, this led me to think about what sweat can tell us about blackness, gender, performance and labour.
The Blues Body
Forms of black music birthed in America like jazz and blues, have often been linked to sweat. While widely celebrated now, when Jazz was initially created, some saw it as this primitive, evil thing. Unsurprisingly, this paralleled how expressions of black religion and its influences from African spirituality were also deemed. After all, Jazz was partially formed from spirituals and hymns of enslaved Africans. Jumping, dancing, stomping, shouting, sweating - physicality and expression whether through worship or music have been criticised or eroticised - sometimes internally.
In theologian Kelly Brown Douglas’ lecture, The Black Church and the Blues Body, she talks about at how the black church has historically pushed back against “blues bodies” - which she describes all African Americans as having, but particularly referencing women and LGTBQ+ black people - in place of the “hyper-proper” respectability. Douglas explains: “Blues bodies are non-bourgeois bodies; they are the bodies of the black underclass.” Yet, Douglas notes that the blues bodies and the black church are fused, they can’t be separated. “Try as it might to keep the blues out of its holy place, the blues is present in the very bodies of the people in the pews.”
As with many genres of music created by black folks, jazz eventually ended up falling into the mainstream and crossing racial divides. But, the Chicago-born composer Anthony Braxton believed that the white gaze was still more interested in the exertion and physical performance of black musicians - as a sign of legitimacy – than the music being played. He referred to this as “the reality of the sweating brow.” In this sense, sweat is fetishised on black people’s bodies.
And take Ma Rainey, a black bisexual singer who was called “the mother of blues” and also callously referred to as “the ugliest woman in show business”. She was known for her velvet contralto voice, moaning style of singing, capturing authentic southern blues and also sweating in her energetic performances. Of course, fatphobia and colourism contributed towards her inability to burrow into Western femininity and beauty standards, but I can’t help but think, so did her perspiration.
“Sweat is entangled with gender to reveal the ways in which some bodies still remain privileged,” the paper Sweating bodies: Men, masculinities, affect, emotion states. Men are meant to sweat. It’s a symbol of athleticism. It’s hot even. But when women sweat, when black women sweat, it’s a source of shame, ugliness and hypermasculinity. In modern contexts, I think about how Beyoncé won’t even look at a stage without industrial fans blasting towards her. And we saw how Whitney Houston was ridiculed for sweating on stage too.
Gender Performance and Labour
Sweat also signifies class and labour. In Zora Neale Hurston’s 1929 short story Sweat, we meet Delia Jones, a black woman who is the main breadwinner for her family by working as a launderer for wealthier white people. She is also being abused by her husband Sykes - one reason being his insecurity around his own masculinity and incapability to be the provider. “Sweat, sweat, sweat! Work and sweat, cry and sweat, pray and sweat!” she shouts at him, growing sick of her hard work being undervalued.
“To associate sweat with the world of women is to question gender roles and the typical assumption of women as domestic labourers whose labours are important in their effects, but generally light tasks of homemaking,” Laura Lindenberger writes in the essay Sweat: Through the Lens of Womanness. But, Delia’s work isn’t a light task, it’s sweaty and gruelling but it’s what ultimately supports her and her husband. And Sykes hates her for it, he despises her body (and its functions) for supporting her and her growing independence. It is a story that questions “femininity and gender roles within societal classifications of class and race.”
And of course, sweat also brings up notions of hygiene. If the do-you-wash-your-legs? debate taught us anything, it was an indicator of the long-standing history of the racialised nature of hygiene. Sweat, falling into this category. Within the diaspora, cleanliness, if not hyper-cleanliness, has been passed down, especially to women, all the way from slavery where stereotypes about black people being dirty began. And I could go on and on about how this has real-life consequences for black women today who are targeted by companies, only for it to be discovered later down the line that these hygiene products may cause serious health risks.
Some people want to see you toil without showing physical signs of that labour, and for others, it’s the only way they’ll believe you’re doing it right. Sweat is body language - a signal for our anxieties, our pleasures, our labour.
I’ll never really have a concrete answer on why that guy in the pub was so horrified by my sweat. But last year, I somehow found myself in a sweat lodge in Mexico. Although I nearly lost my entire sense of reality, being drenched in sweat - my sweat - was one of the most healing experiences my body and nervous system has ever gone through.
Thanks for reading!
Nie x
WHAT I’M WATCHING: The Americas on BBC, it’s a nature documentary narrated by Tom Hanks. It’s perfect Sunday scaries watching and probably propaganda but the series is helping me view the two continents, especially North America in a different context, through the lens of the more-than-human world.
WHAT I’M READING: All Fours by Miranda July.
WHAT I’M DOING: I started an online bird course this week. Did you know owls turn their head so far because their eyes are shaped like cylinders and can’t move around…