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February 11, 2022
Kaya Oakes's Playlist for Her Book "The Defiant Middle"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Kaya Oakes explores the liminal spaces women explore in her thought-provoking and eloquent book The Defiant Middle.
Shelf Awareness wrote of the book:
"Journalist Kaya Oakes offers stories of trailblazing women and thought-provoking insights on how to defy society's expectations."
In her own words, here is Kaya Oakes's Book Notes music playlist for her book The Defiant Middle:
Many years ago, before I wrote about the intersections of feminism, religion, society and culture, I wrote a book about indie and DIY music and culture. As it turns out, that book and that background in zines, college radio, comics and so on has been super useful in shifting to a focus on writing about religion, and particularly about those marginalized by institutional religion. As someone who’s obsessed with telling the stories of what happens to people who live outside of the cultural mainstream, and as someone who’s played music and been around musicians for most of her life, the Venn diagram of stories people tell outside of the spotlight is the background story of this playlist.
The foreground story is that The Defiant Middle is about the ways society, religion and culture have historically pressured women to conform to certain ideals of passivity, quietness, femininity and fertility, among other things. The results have been disastrous, for the most part, and every time women push back and try to insist on hewing their own paths, they get punished for it. How do you create a soundtrack to this? It got me thinking of the central questions that guide the book: what do we mean when we say “woman” anyway? And since we’re seemingly stuck in a patriarchal society at least for the time being, how do we make the most of the tools we’ve been handed?
That’s why this playlist has a combination of covers by women of songs written by men and songs written by women who don’t fit neatly into the archetypes of women in punk, rock, hip hop, soul, or in one case classical. An artist like Grace Jones primarily performs covers, but she reinvents them so brilliantly and so much in her own image and style that our memory of the original often fades away. Everyone loves Dolly Parton now, but in her youth she was dismissed and poked fun at when it turns out she was making the jokes all along. Nina Simone could turn anything, even a song from the ridiculous musical Hair, into protest music, and Patti Smith can burn everything down. Artists like MIA and Missy Elliot can inject so much creativity into their music they create whole new genres within genres, Lizzo and Mary J. Blige have made defiance their whole creative project, Sinead O’Connor is getting a much-deserved re-examination, and trans women like Anhoni help us to understand why an inclusive feminist future is the only one that matters.
Most of these songs are from my own lifetime or maybe a bit before, but I did travel further back in time to the 10th century to include a hymn by Hildegard Von Bingen, who was one of the women to originally inspire this book. Hildegard, who didn’t start writing until she was in her forties and in the grip of a visionary experience, was a polymath in a time when most women couldn’t read or write. She was the leader of her religious community, a pharmacist of herbal medicine, a woman who went on preaching tours calling out the corruption of church leadership, and a person whose imagination was so vast she had to invent her own language. Not a bad role model for any era, but particularly in our own when women are persistently caged in by other people’s ideas of what we should be, Hildegard and the other women on this playlist are models of self-invention in the face of judgement.
Kaya Oakes is a journalist and author of several books, including The Nones Are Alright and Radical Reinvention. She teaches writing at UC Berkeley and is a contributing writer for America magazine and speaks on topics related to religion, writing, and feminism from coast to coast and abroad. Her work has received multiple awards, with her essays and journalism appearing in The Guardian, Slate, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, and On Being. She was born and raised in Oakland, California, where she still lives.
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