Hip Hop headz in sex ed: Gender, agency, and styling in New Zealand

Abstract

This study examines Hip Hop styling, gender, and sexual agency in a sex education class. The focus is on the indirect indexing of gender by a female-bodied student through the Hip Hop cultural personas of braggadocio and swagger, providing a rare look at ‘mundane’ performances of Hip Hop and its relationship to gender. Discourse analysis demonstrates that she used Hip Hop styling to manage ascriptions of sexual agency during a discussion task as she repeatedly recontextualized the telling of a classroom incident. Her language use afforded the trying out of identity meanings and required complex discursive work in relation to constructs such as masculinity, femininity, straight, and lesbian. These processes assisted her to negotiate how sexual agency might fit with her various identifications and identities. Therefore the potential for Hip Hop styling to connect identities with language has implications for both sexuality education and the study of sociolinguistics. (Agency, gender, Hip Hop, performativity, sexuality, social identities, styling)*

Sociophonetics, semantics, and intention

“…Expressing concern for one’s hearer is generally compatible with intending to have one’s intention be recognized. King’s (2018) research on language in a sex-education class, where a student selectively employs ‘Hip Hop styling’ prosody to overtly index dominance, provides another example of using phonetics to convey social meaning and intending to have that intention recognized.…”

Toward a non-binary sense of mobility: insights from self-presentation in Instagram photography during COVID-19 pandemic

“…For instance, Duranti (2004) introduces performance and encoding as two mutually constitutive dimensions of agency in language: performance is understood as the enacting of agency, and encoding is how human action is depicted through linguistic and/or semiotic means. King's (2018) research on New Zealand students' use of Hip Hop styling to manage ascriptions of sexual agency focuses on how individuals contest hegemonic ideologies about gender and sexuality that circulate as discourses in society. He argues that these ideologies constitute the broader sociocultural context in interaction, placing structural constraints on the resources available for individuals' gender performances.…”

“…In order to seek a middle ground between different dimensions and traditions, I will adopt a sociocultural approach to agency and define it as the discursive or semiotic mobilization of a capacity to act (Ahearn, 2010; Bucholtz and Hall, 2005; King, 2014, 2018). This capacity is constructed and negotiated through self-positionings in (inter)action or self-presentation via subject positions (King, 2014, 2018).…”

“…In order to seek a middle ground between different dimensions and traditions, I will adopt a sociocultural approach to agency and define it as the discursive or semiotic mobilization of a capacity to act (Ahearn, 2010; Bucholtz and Hall, 2005; King, 2014, 2018). This capacity is constructed and negotiated through self-positionings in (inter)action or self-presentation via subject positions (King, 2014, 2018). In the case of Instagram photography during the COVID-19 pandemic, this is instantiated as the ability to negotiate a subject’s (im)mobile selfhood through self-presentation as well as enactment of certain social roles and relationships by employing a range of linguistic and semiotic resources in their repertoires.…”

Constructing ‘corrupted village wives and urban men’ through multilingual performances

“…Numerous works thus far have examined how stance-taking is accomplished through phonological, morphological, and lexical choices (Kiesling 2001; Eckert 2008; Goodwin & Alim 2010; Johnstone 2011). Scholars have also attempted to bring together the analytical frames of stance in interaction with the sociolinguistic focus on stylization in relation to various salient social categories such as race or gender (King 2018). Making productive use of Bakhtin's (1981) notion of stylization—‘an artistic representation of another's linguistic style’—sociolinguists interrogated how styling appropriates, explores, reproduces, or challenges influential images and stereotypes of groups that speakers themselves either belong to or do not belong to (Rampton 1999; Thompson 2010; Coupland 2011).…”