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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
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