El Filósofo del Rap

LA Queer Studies Conference 2009: The Queer Vicissitudes of Hip Hop Expressive Culture

Matt Lipps ©

As promised here are the panel and paper abstracts for a panel I'm participating in with Michael Ralph and Laurence Ralph on Queer Hip Hop at the UCLA Queer Studies Conference (October 9-10). If you're in the LA area the conference is free and open to the public and is a great chance to see some rising young queer scholars.

Anyway, without further ado...

The Queer Vicissitudes of Hip Hop Expressive Culture
This panel delves into hip hop lyricism, fashion, and imagery to explore the queer vicissitudes that structure this mode of expressive culture. A vicissitude is a variation, an alternation, a change in fortune, a mutation: a reversal, perhaps. At the very least, it captures the gap between what one is and what one has imagined oneself to be. The aporia signaled here is not the space between the perspectives of two different rappers— i.e. a gay rapper versus a straight one—but the tension between two different views of one’s self. We explore this phenomenon of doubling by discussing the musical and visual production of several hip hop artists that dominate the contemporary landscape, these include: R. Kelly, Kanye West, Lil’ Wayne, T Pain, T.I., Andrew 3000, and Common.


“No Homo": Racialized Sexual Surveillance in Hip Hop
Hip hop culture is increasingly constructed by scholars and detractors alike as a hypermasculine space of unabashed violence, materialism, misogyny, and homophobia. This concern with sexuality and bodily comportment in hip hop performance tends toward a reified a mode of analysis which places too much emphasis on dubious standards for respectable discourse. In this paper I focus on performances of queer masculinity in hip hop as spaces that contradict dominant depictions of hip hop sexuality as increasingly narrow and formulaic. Hip hop masculinity often straddles the contractions of sexuality, desire, and gender performance, revealing the artifice of its constructions. Performances of queer masculinity in hip hop simultaneously disrupt and reify existing structures of oppression in the process of articulating a complex sexual and gendered personhood that is vibrant, diverse, and complex. By charting the ambivalence of the fad phrase, “no homo,” I explore how hip hop artists speak homophobia as a way of enacting nonnormative intimacies that interrupt racial and sexual surveillance. In this paper, I examine two performances of queer masculinity and intimacy: the first is the phallocentrism of Jim Jones’ “Pop Champagne” music video. The second mode of performance surfaces in a series of advertisements that Lil Wayne did for Strapped Condoms. I demonstrate that these queer performances eschew “respectability,” in favor of a masculine persona that embraces conflicting conceptions of intimacy and desire. These performances do not merely expose the fissures of hip hop masculinity, they exploit them, reveling in their pretenses. By grappling with the complexity of these ambivalent performances, I believe we can establish a scholarly discourse on hip-hop sexuality and gender performance that is, if not quite feminist, undoubtedly queer.

Marisol Lebron
Department of Social & Cultural Analysis
New York University


“I’m a Flirt”
In centering their attention on the “down low” phenomenon, analysts of male same sex intimacy feed social paranoias that frame homosexuality as the principal source of death and disease in African American lived spaces. They also tend to conflate homoeroticism with homosexuality in a way that is both crude and imprecise. Given that male rappers are increasingly marketed as sex symbols for both men and women, and since some of the social contexts rappers draw from (like jails and prisons) are widely known as arenas where male same sex intimacy flourishes, there is sufficient evidence to consider how male homoerotics structure interpersonal relationships in music that draws upon prison culture, like hip hop/r & b. In the song, “I’m a Flirt,” for instance, one man’s claim that he is capable of stealing another man’s girlfriend is precisely what generates a male homoerotic episode—a narrative in which those activities that a man finds titillating become central to a dialogue with other men that evinces more intimacy between them
than with any of their purported female objects of desire.

Laurence Ralph
Department of Anthropology
University of Chicago


“Where I come from, gay people were like aliens …”
Photos that flooded the Internet while Kanye West and friends were visiting Paris Fashion Week in February 2009, ignited a firestorm of controversy. The sartorial decisions that had everyone buzzing concerned Mr. West and the motley crue of fashionistas that looked, by all concerned, “gay.” Kanye dismissed the rumors, explaining that “the way a man dresses doesn’t have anything with what he likes to do at night.” Still, he was more empathetic than angry. In fact, Kanye indicated that he considered it his duty to “educate” his brethren and attributed the prevailing homophobia to the hypermasculinist ethos that pervades street cultures like the one in which he was reared, “Where I come from,” he said, invoking his native land, the south side of Chicago, “gay people were like aliens.” It was an apt image, and not simply because Kanye has routinely cast himself as a space explorer. For his 2008, “Glow in the Dark” tour, ‘Ye cast himself as a protagonist who crash landed on an unidentified planet. This, after he had already featured the track “Spaceship” on his debut album The College Dropout. This paper explores how rappers who artists who are frequently branded as queer—Kanye West, Lil Wayne, Common, and André 3000—have cast themselves as aliens to explain the way they fit into the broader cultural phenomenon that we call “hip hop.” André is an ATLien, Lil Wayne is a Martian, and Common has deployed futuristic, space age sounds, and accoutrements to craft his own gender-bending persona. These are but a few of the examples this paper will explore toward a theory of queer vicissitudes in hip hop lyricism and performance.

Michael Ralph
Department of Social & Cultural Analysis
New York University

Great article on No Homo....Pause

I am at this very moment actually working on a conference paper for the LA Queer Studies Conference about the rise of the "no homo" phenomenon and how the phrase actually worked to subvert and parody racialized sexual surveillance during the panic over the "downlow." This recent Slate piece by Jonah Weiner addresses many of the points I will touch on in my conference paper, particularly the way that "no homo" functions as a pun that actually draws attention to possible queer readings and nonnormative male intimacies. I'll post the panel and paper abstracts in a day or two, but in the mean time enjoy the Slate piece.

Does This Purple Mink Make Me Look Gay?

The rise of no homo and the changing face of hip-hop homophobia.

By Jonah Weiner
Posted Thursday, Aug. 6, 2009, at 9:55 AM ET

In August, 2005, three weeks before his nationally televised declaration that "George Bush doesn't care about black people," Kanye West made a statement he'd later describe as braver and more difficult than his attack on the White House. Hip-hop, he told MTV, was supposed to be about "speaking your mind and about breaking down barriers, but everyone in hip-hop discriminates against gay people … I wanna just come on TV and just tell my rappers, tell my friends, 'Yo, stop it.' " Taking on Bush was a perfectly hip-hop move, but taking on homophobia, West feared, could be career suicide. Undeterred, he revisited the subject in a November 2005 interview, discussing his love for his openly gay cousin, not to mention his conflicted but evolving attitude toward his interior decorator. West's call for tolerance remains the highest-profile rebuke of gay-bashing that hip-hop has seen.

But old habits die hard, and last week, West amended his position somewhat on "Run This Town," a new Jay-Z single on which the Chicago rapper is a featured guest. "It's crazy how you can go from being Joe Blow," West begins his rap, "to everybody on your dick—no homo." No homo, to those unfamiliar with the term, is a phrase added to statements in order to rid them of possible homosexual double-entendre. ("You've got beautiful balls," you tell your friend at the bocce game—"no homo.") No homo began life as East Harlem slang in the early '90s, and in the early aughts it entered the hip-hop lexicon via the Harlem rapper Cam'ron and his Diplomats crew. Lil Wayne brought the term into the mainstream, sprinkling "no homo" caveats acrosscameos, mix tapes, and his Tha Carter III LP, which was 2008's best-selling album. (Jay-Z has used the word pause in a similar way.)

The term's appearance in hip-hop coincided with the rise of the so-called "down-low brother," a closeted black figure often demonized as a disease-spreading boogeyman, invisible by definition and thus potentially, frightfully, everywhere. Saying "no homo" might have started as a way for rappers to acknowledge and distance themselves from the down-low phenomenon. As the phrase has spread, many have decried no homo as depressingly retrograde, a pigheaded "That's what she said" for homophobes. But the term functions in a more complicated way than a simple slur. As society becomes increasingly gay-tolerant, hip-hop is reassessing its relationship to homosexuality and, albeit in a hedged and roundabout way, it's possible that no homo is helping to make hip-hop a gayer place.

I once asked Method Man whether he thought we'd ever see an openly gay gangsta rapper. He grew visibly agitated. "You can't be fuckin' people in the ass and say you're gangsta," he responded. As Kanye West has observed, gay and hip-hop have traditionally functioned as mutually exclusive terms, Venn diagrams that don't touch (and get really testy at the suggestion that they might, you know, want to). In 1989, Big Daddy Kane summed up the reigning attitude: "The Big Daddy law is anti-faggot." When DMX insulted rivals 10 years later by rapping, "Y'all niggas remind me of a strip club/ 'Cause every time you come around it's like I just gotta get my dick sucked," hip-hop was still so aggressively understood as hetero-centric that it was inconceivable to DMX that there might be anything the least bit gay about his fantasy of a roomful of men fellating him.

No homo tweaks this dynamic because it allows, implicitly, that rap is a place where gayness can in fact be expressed by the guy on the mic, not just scorned in others. In the very act of trying to "purify" an utterance of any gayness, after all, the no homo tag must contaminate it first—it's both a denial and a flashing neon arrow. This isn't to suggest that saying no homo is a radical act, but there's an appealing sense in which the phrase refuses to function as tidily as some of its boosters might like. This is especially striking in those cases when rappers add no homo to statements of sexual pleasure we'd otherwise have no reason to think of as gay. "No homo, I go hard," Chamillionaire rapped on a recent mix tape, implying that an erection is inherently homosexual. Even more absurdly, when Cam'ron named a song "Silky (No Homo)," it was hard to decide what he was disavowing. The emotions of sadness and longing expressed in the lyrics? Or the tactile sensation of silkiness itself?

Often, no homo appears not just as a disclaimer but as a punch line, a See what I did there? that flaunts one's cleverness. "Just shot a video with R. Kelly, but no homo though," Lil Wayne rapped in 2007. In this line—a sly nod to both a music video co-starring Wayne and Kelly and to the R&B singer's alleged sex tape—no homo isn't an afterthought; it's the keystone that holds the whole joke together. A funny side effect here is that the no homo vogue doubtless encourages rappers not only to scrutinize everything they say for trace gayness, but to actively think up gay double-entendres just so that they can cap them off with no homo kickers.

Beyond this, there's a sense in which no homo, rather than limiting self-expression in hip-hop, actually helps to expand it. We see this play out in the rhymes and personas of the term's most famous practitioners. Cam'ron and the Diplomats are, ironically, among the most homoerotic MCs in rap. They wear pink and purple furs and brag regularly about how good they look. In the video for "Pop Champagne," Jim Jones and Juelz Santana giddily douse each other with frothy white geysers of bubbly. On Cam'ron's "Hey Ma," he describes having sex with a female paramour with seven vague words—"She was up in the Range, man"—but when the girl leaves, he immediately calls Santana to narrate the act in detail and, in a sense, to enjoy and consummate it fully. Similarly, Lil Wayne has been photographed kissing his mentor, the rapper Baby, on the lips and cultivates a shirtless, slithering, rock-star-worthy air of libertine sexuality. Kanye West attends runway shows, keeps an entourage of designer-clad dandies, and blogs regularly about design. When these rappers say "no homo," it can seem a bit like a gentleman's agreement, nodding to the status quo while smuggling in a fuller, less hamstrung notion of masculinity. This is still a concession to homophobia, but one that enables a less rigid definition of the hip-hop self than we've seen before. It's far from a coup, but, in a way, it's progress.

Jonah Weiner is a pop critic for Slate.

Article URL:http://www.slate.com/id/2224348/

Lil Mama Apologizes to Leiomy Maldonado

Lil Mama, a judge on MTV's America's Best Dance Crew ( I still don't understand how she landed that job), has issued an apology for her disgusting comments directed at Leiomy Maldonado, an openly transgender member of the all queer group Vogue Evolution.

A behind the scenes clip that ran before the group's performance showed Leiomy storming off during rehearsal and acting diva-ish as the other member of the group complained about her attitude. Despite an outstanding performance Lil Mama berated Leiomy for her bad attitude. Lil Mama told Leiomy:

“Leiomy, come on. Your behavior… it’s unacceptable,” Lil Mama said after watching their performance. “I just feel that you always have to remember your truth. You were born a man and you are becoming a woman. If you’re going to become a woman, act like a lady. Don’t be a bird, like ‘Oh my god, I’m not doing this!’ You know what I’m saying? It gets too crazy and it gets confusing. You’re doing this for America. Even though you’re the face for transgenders, you’re the face of America right now with this group and it’s not about anybody else. It’s about y’all. You know what I’m saying? So do it for the team. Do it for the team.”

Lil Mama's comments prompted an uproar among ABDC's LGBT audience, some of whom alerted gay watchdog group GLAAD about the comments. In a statement released by GLAAD Lil Mama apologized saying:

"I would like to clarify anything that was misunderstood from Sunday's show. My remarks were never meant to be disrespectful regarding Leiomy's gender nor offensive to the LGBT community, which has been a community that has supported me in all my endeavors. However, in hindsight, I recognize that my words may have come across as hurtful. I spoke with her privately after the taping to express that it was not my intent to offend her or any member of the transgender community and that I still live for Vogue Evolution."

Between Shane Sparks' barely concealed weekly homophobic panics and Lil Mama's ignorance and insensitivity I doubt that much will change with how ABDC deals with the members of Vogue Evolution, especially Leiomy. Right now the show's producers are probably counting on ABDC's presumed teenaged hetero demographic not to keep voting for Vogue Evolution as the show gets closer to the finale. In essence this move would rid the show of the "problem" that queerness "causes" without having to interrogate ABDC's implicit heterosexist and gender normative standards.

In the end I just wished that the judges (and the audience) shut the fuck up and deal with their discomfort and unease because Vogue Evolution are some fierce ass queers of color and they deserve the title.

Punketon

Musicologo ft. Menes - "Llamado De Emergencia" (Los De La Nazza)

CFP: PRSA 2010 "Cuerpos vigilados y castigados: Resistance and Empowerment in the Body Rican"

Juan Sánchez, RICAN/STRUCTIONS: A MULTI-LAYERED LEGACY

Cuerpos vigilados y castigados:

Resistance and Empowerment in the Body Rican

Puerto Rican Studies Association 9th Biennial Meeting
Call for Papers, Panels and Presentations Hartford, Connecticut October 21-23, 2010

Please join us at the Puerto Rican Studies Association Conference.

For over three centuries, Puerto Ricans have been subject to—and involved in—various types and levels of surveillance and persecution, and have developed a variety of creative approaches to oppose, resist, engage or live with them. Going against the established juridical-political order; resisting socio-economic conditions; being poor and/or nonwhite; being positioned outside the law when trying individually or collectively to survive; not being an adult male, and/or not identifying as heterosexual; as victims of disease or as persons themselves seen as embodying disease (physiological, mental, or social); speaking the “wrong” language or speaking the “right” language the “wrong” way; having too many children or actively deciding when not to have a child; wanting to live in an unpolluted environment; playing and dancing to the “wrong” music; praying and speaking to the “wrong” God(s); being too loud or refusing to be a spectacle; being in the wrong place at the wrong time; or just simply being. Each of these, severally and
apart, have served as provocation, cause or justification for supervision, accusation, and penalty.

In 2010 our conference theme centers on these and other sites of discipline and punishment, as well as on strategies of coping, opposition and resistance. Carried out by foreigners and by our compatriots, by strangers and by our own kin, by others and by ourselves, these varied practices and instances of penalization have occurred both formally and informally, publicly and privately, overtly and covertly; with the use of force and/or by instilling efficient behavior and a lucrative obedience, episodically and in the historical long-term.

This year’s conference will also explore the ways in which Puerto Ricans have created and can continue to create critical, social, cultural, political and economic opportunities for civic action. Hartford offers us a privileged and critical space for reflection. Locale of the first Puerto Rican elected mayor of a capital city on the “mainland,” it is also home to the largest proportional population of Puerto Ricans residing in any city beyond the confines of the island of Puerto Rico itself. Following President Barack Obama’s historic nomination to the Supreme Court of the Hon. Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina and Puerto Rican to be so appointed, this year’s Conference's exploration of empowerment as a conduit for civic action seems particularly timely and assumes even greater salience. Not only the first Latina to be appointed to the Court, Judge Sotomayor is also the first Puerto Rican ever to serve in one of the highest public offices available within the governing structures of the United States. Aspiring to a critical reflection about disciplinary discourses of punishment and power affecting Puerto Ricans, this year’s conference aims also to engage those narratives and practices of empowerment which facilitate and enable progressive civic action.


PRSA Conference Themes
This year’s conference thus features two mutually constitutive themes, one with a focus on technologies of the self, one on practical approaches to social, political and economic empowerment. Efforts to study the intersections of power and the body have opened up new spaces for critical thinking and collective action. To critically explore their diverse forms and dimensions, we invite presenters to propose papers, panels, poster sessions, and by other creative means and fora, engaging with any of the following, merely suggestive rather than exhaustive, list of possible areas and topics:

1) Papers, panels, or presentations that focus on the roles of state technologies of power used to discipline the Puerto Rican subject, as well as on modalities of resistance to them. Proposals should include themes in the areas of law, justice, state repression and violence, and other institutional mechanisms of discipline and punishment, as well as proposals that explore critical modes of resistance. 2) Papers, panels, or presentations that are especially apt and relevant to this (New England) region, as one of the objectives of this conference is to create a critical space for the exchange of ideas, experiences and reflections on how to empower Puerto Ricans in local, state, national and international forums. 3) Papers, panels, or presentations that elucidate the ways in which Puerto Rican studies can inform broader debates across disciplines, thereby encouraging that interdisciplinarity which has traditionally been one of the hallmarks of the PRSA and its conferences.

We encourage submissions from the array of communities that together shape the Puerto Rican experience: university and college professors, independent scholars, community and labor organizers/activists, teachers and intellectual workers, artists, and graduate and undergraduate students.

Send two copies of your proposal form, abstract and membership fee by
February 10, 2010 to:
Secretariat, Puerto Rican Studies Association: 2009 Conference
c/o Latino Studies Program
Cornell University
434 Rockefeller Hall
Ithaca NY 14853

Please remember that only proposals from paid-up PRSA members will be accepted for inclusion in the 9th Conference. Membership dues must be received by the PRSA Secretariat by February 1, 2010. Membership dues information and a downloadable membership form are available at
http://www.puertorican-studies.org.

PRSA Pre-Conference Workshops
The PRSA Pre-Conference Workshops are designed to provide junior faculty and advance graduate students with a series of professional workshops which seek to assist in faculty development and career planning for scholars whose research and work projects focus on Puerto Rico, Puerto Ricans and their communities, and Puerto Rican Studies. These will include a workshop on tenure and promotion as well as a discussion of the history of PRSA and its contributions to intellectual life and collaborative community work. Pre-Conference Workshops will take place on Thursday, October 21, 2010. More details forthcoming.

The Sponsoring Institutions
The Puerto Rican Studies Association was founded to help promote scholarship in the field and offer a place for its scholars to come together. The Association meets every other year (in even-numbered years) in a different location. We maintain a list-serve for the dissemination of news of interest to the membership. For more information on the PRSA please visit our website at: http://www.puertorican-studies.org/. We encourage students, scholars, activists, and others with interests in the island and its people to join and actively participate in the PRSA.

The City of Hartford, a vibrant city with one of the largest proportional populations of Puerto Ricans in the United States, will assist in the hosting of the 2010 conference. Our 9th biennial conference represents the collaborative effort of members of the city’s local Puerto Rican and Latino communities as well as various academic programs and institutions affiliated with the University of Connecticut, Eastern Connecticut State University and Trinity College.

The Conference Sites
The PRSA Conference will take place in the Hartford Marriott Downtown in Hartford, Connecticut, which will also serve as the primary lodging site for conference attendees. The Hartford Marriott is located in downtown Hartford, within walking distance of many of the city’s amenities. The city of Hartford is itself conveniently located at the crossroads of New England. Only 30 minutes from Bradley International Airport, it is also within reasonable driving distance from New York City, NY, Boston, MA, and Providence, RI.

The Hartford Marriott was selected because it provided a consolidated space with access to meeting rooms as well as a central location within walking distance of restaurants and other downtown establishments. Conference rates will be available. Most of the conference events will take place in the available conference rooms in the hotel. For more information on the hotel, please visit their website at:
http://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/bdldt-hartford-marriott-downtown/.
Additional information on hotel rates will be forthcoming and available at the PRSA
webpage.

For local information please contact, Charles R. Venator-Santiago, IPRLS & Department of Political Science, University of Connecticut, charles.venator@uconn.edu

For information on PRSA please contact:
• PRSA Secretariat, Marti Dense, Latinos Studies Program,
Cornell University, prsa@cornell.edu
• PRSA President, Gladys M. Jiménez-Muñoz, Department of Sociology,
Binghamton University-SUNY, gjimenez@binghamton.edu
• PRSA Program Committee Chair, Vilma Santiago- Irizarry,
Department of Anthropology, Cornell University, vs23@cornell.edu .

Straight Trippin'

NACOTHEQUE BACK TO DOIN’ IT OLD SKOOL

An Official Announcement from Nacotheque Producers and Resident DJs
AMYLULITA & MARCELO CUNNING

NEW YORK, NY - After two years of awesome nights every second and fourth Saturday at Fontana's in NYC the producers have decided to go back to doin’ it old skool. Originally Nacotheque was a mobile, underground, alternative Latin dance party in NYC where producers Marcelo Cunning and Amylu Meneses put together special one-off parties wherever and whenever. After about a year and half of club hopping Nacotheque was invited to start a bi-month party at Fontana’s and called it home ever since. After October 2009 there won't be anymore pre-scheduled monthly parties at Fontana's.

“We’re not ending Nacotheque. Just going back to doing it when there’s something special to celebrate like an album release party that we really love or an after-party for a band we love.” Says Amylu. The producers will be taking this time to focus on other projects as well as catching up on some much needed sleep. "Thanks to everyone that has supported us in our 3+ years of existence. We've met lots of amazing people and we have nothing but good memories behind the parties. But don't fret, it's not the last you've seen of us." Says Marcelo.

The last four official monthly parties at Fontana’s will be on Saturday, September 12th - the official Hello Seahorse! “Bestia” album release party with guest DJ Carlos Tropicaza (Los Fancy Free), Saturday September 26th - TBA, Saturday, October 10th - special live performance by the leader singer of Porter JUAN SON, and October 24th - the Nacotheque Halloween Costume party with a very special live performance by Mexico City’s reina of anarchy cumbia AMANDITITITA. She’ll be filming scenes for her next music video during the party!

Again, we repeat Nacotheque is NOT ending!! The Nacotheque producers will continue planning special one-off parties in NYC when the time is right; continue participating in special gigs out of town, as well as starting up some other fun projects. Stay tuned!

Location: Fontana’s (in the basement) - 105 Eldridge St btwn Broome & Grand St.
Time: 11:00PM – 4AM
Age Limit: 21+ w/ ID
OPEN BAR: 11pm - 12am SVEDKA Vodka

Live performances & guest DJs for Sept & Oct:
Sept, 12 – Hello Seahorse! “Bestia” release party + guest DJ Carlos Tropicaza (Los Fancy Free)
Sept, 26 – TBA
Cover: $5 at the door

Oct, 10 – Juan Son
Oct, 26 – Amandititita (also filming scenes for her new music video)
Cover: $10 at the door

Skinny Jeans: The Movement

The New Boyz address Jerkin' Fashion specifically in the following video clips. I think their commentary about how the 80's influenced them is really interesting. Throw back with swag...







Revenge of the Nerds... I love it!

Tim Wise on Race and the Healthcare Protests

*tip of the fitted to Racialicious