New Orleans bounce music, sexuality, and affect
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.
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
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