This article introduces the concept of badass femininity, a marginalized femininity captured in the performances of contemporary b-girls (women breakdancers) and blues women of the 1920s. The author uses the work of Hortense Spillers, Maria Lugones, Chela Sandoval, and Angela Davis to argue that non-normative gender performances from the fringes of society are necessary consequence of histories of enslavement, genocide, and exploitation. Badass femininity is a one version of a multiplicity of femininities. It resignifies qualities typically associated with masculinity through women whose work in dance and music move these gender performances from the margins to center stage.
Based on in-depth interviews conducted with several women ethnographers of Hip Hop dances, this chapter explores experiences of critical hiphopography—a method that combines multiple grounded approaches through the social imperatives of Hip Hop culture and critical research strategies. The interview content touches on three themes: Hip Hop’s show and prove ethos, the complications of researching in community, and the impact of academic institutional power on research. The chapter emphasizes the challenges of doing hiphopography and explores how folks have attempted to work through them. It argues that critical hiphopography in practice provides research strategies that center community, are attentive to power, and disrupt academic conventions.
This article closely examines oral histories of b-boys Aby and Kwikstep, b-girl Baby Love, and poppers Cartoon and Wiggles, and the social choreography necessary to navigate the streets of the South Bronx in the 1970s and 1980s that has an indelible link to four core battling principles as articulated by 1970s b-boy Trac2: survivalism, strategizing, nomadism, and illusionism. By comparing and contrasting foundational elements of battling techniques with life lessons about growing up in the Bronx, the comparison signals the impact of “outlaw culture” within hip-hop, and the counterdominant sensibilities taught in battle cyphers.
Opening with a thick descriptive story of an ethnographic experience of the invisible force or spirit of cyphering titled “Dark Matter,” chapter 1 goes on to center a comparative look at multiple African diasporic circle practices, drawing attention to their extraphenomenal, spiritual, and liberatory feelings and experiences, articulated differently by each practitioner. In this chapter, the main interlocutors—including Float, Silky Jones, Poe One, Triple7, Miss Little, Aby, Pia, and Jaekwon —discuss this little-recognized dimension of the cypher. By amplifying Africanist aesthetics, we can better understand breakers’ broad articulations of overlapping experiences of spirit and liberation. The chapter further explores the epistemic violence involved in invisibilizing Africanist aesthetics.
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