‘She don’t need no help’

deconsolidating gender, sex and sexuality in New Orleans bounce music

Authors

  • Christina Schoux Casey Aalborg University
  • Maeve Eberhardt University of Vermont

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.32522

Keywords:

hip-hop language, queer linguistics, markedness, masculinity, gender binarism, New Orleans

Abstract

New Orleans bounce music is a dance-oriented hip-hop form that has emerged as a notably non-normative genre, in which queer Black bounce artists destabilise binary cultural paradigms and emphasise queerness as inclusive and relational. We explore how five artists' lyrics and public personae actively refute the consolidated, naturalised nexus of gender, sex, and sexuality by disentangling each of the three strands from one another. In order to explore how this is accomplished, we created a corpus of bounce lyrics. We analysed lexical indices of gender; self-positioning as feminine subjects; sexual subject-object positioning; normalisation of sex between men; retention of masculine subjectivities; and rejection of gender binarism. Further, the artists repeatedly expose the ubiquitous nature of sex between men in their lyrics, working to assert its existence and normalcy in the popular imagination. The bounce artists we analyse expose and articulate forms of deviance, expressing a blackness and queerness that insists on making visible the humanity and sexuality of Black people and queer people. Bounce music, made by queer people of colour, for an audience of predominantly poor, heterosexual women of colour, is a communitarian cultural labour. 

Author Biographies

  • Christina Schoux Casey, Aalborg University

    Christina Schoux Casey is an assistant professor of English linguistics in the Department of Culture and Global Studies at Aalborg University. Her research uses New Orleans language and culture to show how the city's cultural practices offer epistemological alternatives to colonial, patriarchal, heterosexist, White supremacist Western culture. Her research weaves together linguistic and discourse analysis with work in critical sociology, humanistic geography, and media studies.

  • Maeve Eberhardt, University of Vermont

    Maeve Eberhardt is an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Vermont. Her research centres on identities at the intersections of race, gender and sexuality. Her work takes a critical approach towards understanding the ways in which linguistic performances and representations of social personas serve to reinforce and subvert systems of oppression.

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Published

2018-10-22

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Casey, C. S., & Eberhardt, M. (2018). ‘She don’t need no help’: deconsolidating gender, sex and sexuality in New Orleans bounce music. Gender and Language, 12(3), 318-345. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.32522