New Orleans bounce music, sexuality, and affect

Christina Schoux Casey

    Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

    Abstract

    This article explores how language, sexuality, and affect are circuited in New Orleans bounce music. Bounce features lyrics that characterize the performers as queer, describe sex explicitly, celebrate sex between male-bodied people, and expose the hypocrisy of straight-acting men. Bounce lyrics are just one element of bounce performances, however, which consist of the reciprocal relationship between the dancers in the audience, the intensity of the MC’s exhortations, and the rhythm of the backing musical track. Bounce performances create a fleeting community of artists, bodies and music that is less about the expression of discrete sociodemographic categories, and more about a collective affective event. Using ideas of relationality from queer and affect theory, and Stallybrass and White’s “high/low” cultural hierarchies, the article show how bounce challenges normative and academic ideas about the autonomous ‘speaking subject,’ and supports a messier understanding of the self as affectively relational.
    Original languageEnglish
    JournalJournal of Language and Sexuality
    Volume7
    Issue number1
    Pages (from-to)5-30
    Number of pages25
    ISSN2211-3770
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2018

    Keywords

    • affect, sexuality, queer theory, hip hop, dance, relationality, binarism, New Orleans bounce

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