When Hip Hop Unmasks Masculinity, Part 1

SUMMARY

Professors Joseph Ewoodzie and Tyler Bunzey join the pod this week to talk gender in hip hop.

• Samantha talks everyone through alternative representations of masculinity in hip hop. 

• How does including classical instruments in hip hop impact our view of the genre?

• How does the advent into the mainstream of rappers with different sexualities and gender performances impact hip hop now?

• Is it probable that there were LGBTQ rappers at the inception of hip hop? Dr. Joseph Ewoodzie weighs in…

• We continue to examine which voices who are valued in hip hop by zooming out and considering all of its historical influences.

• Tyler Bunzey offers some important cultural context around Southern rappers and the performance of gender in hip hop – how do different US cultures shape that performance? 

• He also breaks down how gender and sexuality are racialized – why is queerness considered to be a white thing if Marsha P Johnson was at the forefront of LGBTQ rights movement?

Referenced in the episode

• Interview with Black Violin

• Black Violin’s “Stereotypes”

• Tyler Bunzey’s Hip Hop Sublime theory

• Dr. Ewoodzie’s seminal book Break Beats in the Bronx

• Lil Nas X, Saucy Santana, Ice Spice: LGBTQ rappers are queering hip-hop like never before

• Big Freedia challenges hip hop as we know it

• Daphne Brooks’s Liner Notes for the Revolution

• Check out our last Beneath the MASK 🎭

COMPANION PIECES:

• Sugar Hill Band? Capitalism and MASKulinity in Hip Hop

• MASKulinity is Making Some People a Lot of Money

• Unpopular opinion on Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer

OUR GUESTS THIS WEEK:

Dr. Joseph Ewoodzie, Jr.

Dr. Joseph Ewoodzie is Associate Professor of Sociology and Vann Professor of Racial Justice at Davidson College. He studies belonging. In all of his research, he aims to understand how we create an "us" and a "them" and  structure our world to benefit the "us" and penalize the "them." 

His first book, Break Beats in the Bronx: Revisiting Hip Hop’s Early Years, combines history and sociology about symbolic boundaries to provide an account of the making of hip hop. With the help of previously unused archival material, he sheds light on a crucial period (1975-1979) consistently ignored in the historical literature.

His latest book, Getting Something to Eat in Jackson: Race, Class, and Food in The American South,  provides a vivid portrait of African American life in today’s urban South and uses food to explore the complex interactions of race and class.

Tyler Bunzey

Tyler Bunzey is Visiting Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at Johnson C. Smith University. His teaching relates to the history of race and  popular music , hip-hop studies, and Critical Race Theory. His notable courses include "Rapsody's Eve and Hip-Hop Feminism," "Critical Race Theory: A Survey," and "The History of Hip-Hop."

Tags