Cover not available
Article published In:
Language/Sexuality/Affect
Edited by William L. Leap
[Journal of Language and Sexuality 7:1] 2018
► pp. 5–29

New Orleans bounce music, sexuality, and affect

| Aalborg University, Denmark

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, this article shows how bounce challenges normative ideas about the autonomous ‘speaking subject,’ and supports a messier understanding of the self as affectively relational.

Keywords: affect, sexuality, relationality, queer theory, hip hop, dance, binarism, New Orleans bounce
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Queer theory, affect theory, and the power of ‘High’ culture
    • 2.1Queer theory and relationality
    • 2.2Affect theory and relationality
    • 2.3Cultural hierarchies of high and low
  • 3.Bounce music, sexuality, and affect
    • 3.1Queer lyrics
      • 3.1.1Queer reference
      • 3.1.2Explicit sex
      • 3.1.3Men as objects
      • 3.1.4Exposing the down low
    • 3.3Bounce dancing and affect
  • 4.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 22 February 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.17011.sch
References
Allen, Jafari
2012 Black/queer/diaspora at the current conjuncture. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18(2–3): 211–248. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Barnard, Ian
2004 Queer Race: Cultural Interventions in the Racial Politics of Queer Theory. New York: Lang.Google Scholar
Berlant, Lauren
2008 Intuitionists: History and the affective event. American Literary History 20(4): 845–860. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bersani, Leo
1987 Is the rectum a grave? October 431: 197–222. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Besnier, Niko
1990 Language and affect. Annual Review of Anthropology 191: 419–451. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blackman, Lisa & Venn, Couze
2010 Affect. Body & Society 16(1): 7–28. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carby, Hazel
1992 Policing the Black woman’s body in an urban context. Critical Inquiry 18(4): 738–755. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Christmas, Zoe
2013 Interview with Big Freedia. The Snipe. [URL] (December 3, 2014)
Cohen, Cathy
1997 Punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens: The radical potential of queer politics? GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3(4): 437–465. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Collins, Patricia Hill
2006 Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Connolly, William
2006 Experience & experiment. Daedalus 135(3): 67–75. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Coupland, Nikolas
2001 Language, situation, and the relational self: Theorizing dialect-style in sociolinguistics. In Style and Sociolinguistic Variation, Penelope Eckert & John R. Rickford (eds), 185–210. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Dee, Jonathan
2010 Sissy bounce, New Orleans’ gender-bending rap. The New York Times. [URL] (October 12, 2012)
Deumert, Ana
2016 “We need a new language” – Challenging the coloniality of language. (Paper presented at the 21st Sociolinguistics Symposium, University of Murcia, Spain)
Edelman, Lee
2004 No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ellis, Nadia
2015 New Orleans and Kingston: A beginning, a recurrence. Journal of Popular Music Studies 27(4): 387–407. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gottschild, Brenda Dixon
1998 Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts. Westport, CT: Praeger.Google Scholar
Henriques, Julian
2010 The vibrations of affect and their propagation on a night out on Kingston’s dancehall scene. Body & Society 16(1): 57–89. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2014 Rhythmic bodies: Amplification, inflection and transduction in the dance performance techniques of the “Bashment Gal.” Body & Society 20(3–4): 79–112. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Henriques, Julian, Tiainen, Milla & Väliaho, Pasi
2014 Rhythm returns: Movement and cultural theory. Body & Society 20(3–4): 3–29. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Johnson, E. Patrick
2001 “Quare” studies, or (almost) everything I know about queer studies I learned from my grandmother. Text and Performance Quarterly 21(1): 1–25. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kristeva, Julia
1986 [1973] The system and the speaking subject. In The Kristeva Reader, Toril Moi (ed), 25–33. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Leath, Jennifer
2013 Revising Jezebel politics: Toward a new Black sexual ethic. In Black Intersectionalities, Monica Michlin & Jean-Paul Rocchi (eds), 195–210. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.Google Scholar
Levon, Erez
2017 Situating sociolinguistics: Coupland – Theoretical debates. Journal of Sociolinguistics 21(2): 272–288. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Livermon, Xavier
2012 Queer(y)ing freedom: Black queer visibilities in Postapartheid South Africa. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18(2–3): 297–323. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Manning, Erin
2003 Negotiating influence: Argentine tango and a politics of touch. Borderlands 2(1). [URL] (October 4, 2015)
2006 Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
2010 Always more than one: The collectivity of a life. Body & Society 16(1): 117–127. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Massumi, Brian
1995 The autonomy of affect. Cultural Critique 311: 83–109. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2017 The Principle of Unrest: Activist Philosophy in the Expanded Field. London: Open Humanities Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McElhinny, Bonnie
2010 The audacity of affect: Gender, race, and history in linguistic accounts of legitimacy and belonging. Annual Review of Anthropology 391: 309–328. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mikdashi, Maya & Puar, Jasbir
2016 Queer theory and permanent war. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 22(2): 215–222. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Miller, Matt
2012 Bounce: Rap Music and Local Identity in New Orleans. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.Google Scholar
Moraga, Cherrie & Anzaldúa, Gloria
1983 This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.Google Scholar
Motschenbacher, Heiko
2013 “Now everybody can wear a skirt”: Linguistic constructions of non-heteronormativity at Eurovision Song Contest press conferences. Discourse & Society 241: 590–614. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ochs, Elinor & Schiefflin, Bambi
1989 Language has a heart. Text 9(1): 7–25. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Patel, Puja
2013 Bouncing back: The street Kings (and Queens) of New Orleans. Pitchfork. [URL] (December 4, 2014)
Pérez, Elizabeth
2015 The ontology of twerk: From “sexy” Black movement style to Afro-Diasporic sacred dance. African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal 9(1): 16–31. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Phillips, Layli & Stewart, Marla
2009 Nontraditional, nonconforming, and transgressive gender expression and relationship modalities in Black communities. In Black Sexualities: Probing Powers, Passions, Practices, and Policies, Juan Battle & Sandra L. Barnes (eds), 17–36. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Postcolonial Studies Research Network
2015 Relationality: A symposium. University of Otago, New Zealand. [URL] (January 15, 2017)
Riggs, Damian
2010 On accountability: Towards a white middle-class queer “post identity politics identity politics.” Ethnicities 10(3): 344–357. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schoux Casey, Christina & Eberhardt, Maeve
forthcoming. “She don’t need no help”: Deconsolidating gender, sex, and sexuality in New Orleans bounce music. Gender and Language.
Seigworth, Gregory J.
2010 An inventory of shimmers. In The Affect Theory Reader, Melissa Gregg & Gregory J. Seigworth (eds), 1–28. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Shouse, Eric
2005 Feeling, emotion, affect. M/C Journal 8(6). [URL] (September 10, 2013) DOI logo
Stallybrass, Peter & White, Allen
1993 The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Wetherell, Margaret
2015 Trends in the turn to affect: A social psychological critique. Body & Society 21(2): 1–29. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zerilli, Linda
2015 The turn to affect and the problem of judgment. New Literary History 46(2): 261–286. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Dlaske, Kati & Alfonso Del Percio
2022. Introduction: language, work and affective capitalism. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2022:276 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Motschenbacher, Heiko
2020. Affective regimes on Wilton Drive: a multimodal analysis. Social Semiotics ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 23 march 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.