Big Freedia

From the eponymous star of one of the most popular reality shows in Fuse’s history, this no-holds-barred memoir and “snappily dictated story of inverted cultural norms in the wards of New Orleans” (East Bay Express) reveals the fascinating truth about a gay, self-proclaimed mama’s boy who exploded onto the formerly underground Bounce music scene and found acceptance, healing, self-expression, and stardom. As the “undisputed ambassador” of the energetic, New Orleans-based Bounce movement, Big Freedia isn’t afraid to twerk, wiggle, and shake her way to self-confidence, and is encouraging her fans to do the same. In her engrossing memoir, Big Freedia tells the inside story of her path to fame, the peaks and valleys of her personal life, and the liberation that Bounce music brings to herself and every one of her fans who is searching for freedom. Big Freedia immediately pulls us into the relationship between her personal life and her career as an artist; being a “twerking sissy” is not just a job, she says, but a salvation. A place to find solace and escape from the battles she faced growing up in the worst neighborhood in New Orleans. To deal with losing loved ones to the violence on the streets, drug overdoses, and jail. To survive hurricane Katrina by living on her roof for two days with three adults and a child. To grapple with the difficulties and celebrate the joys of living. In this eye-opening memoir that bursts with energy, you’ll learn the history of the Bounce movement and meet all the colorful characters that pepper its music scene. “Whether detailing the highs or the lows, Freedia’s tales pop as much as the booty that made her famous” (Out Magazine).

From the shutdown of Planned Parenthood clinics and rising rates of HIV to opposition to marriage equality and bathroom bills, the New South is the epicenter of the new sex wars. Antagonism toward reproductive freedom, partner rights, and transgender rights has revealed a new and unacknowledged era of southern reconstruction centered on gender and sexuality. In A Dirty South Manifesto, L. H. Stallings celebrates the roots of radical sexual resistance in the New South—a movement that is antiracist, decolonial, and transnational. For people within economically disenfranchised segments of society, those in sexually marginalized communities, and the racially oppressed, the South has been a sexual dystopia. Throughout this book, Stallings delivers hard-hitting manifestos for the new sex wars. With her focus on contemporary Black southern life, Stallings offers an invitation to anyone who has ever imagined a way of living beyond white supremacist heteropatriarchy.

A cross-disciplinary volume that combines and puts into dialogue perspectives on disasters, this book includes contributions from anthropology, history, cultural studies, sociology, and literary studies. Offering a rich and diverse set of arguments and analyses on the ever-relevant theme of catastrophe in the circum-Caribbean, it will encourage debate and collaboration between scholars working on disasters from a range of disciplinary perspectives.

Notions of hip hop authenticity, as expressed both within hip hop communities and in the larger American culture, rely on the construction of the rapper as a Black, masculine, heterosexual, cisgender man who enacts a narrative of struggle and success. In Queer Voices in Hip Hop, Lauron J. Kehrer turns our attention to openly queer and trans rappers and positions them within a longer Black queer musical lineage. Combining musical, textual, and visual analysis with reception history, this book reclaims queer involvement in hip hop by tracing the genre’s beginnings within Black and Latinx queer music-making practices and spaces, demonstrating that queer and trans rappers draw on Ballroom and other cultural expressions particular to queer and trans communities of color in their work in order to articulate their subject positions. By centering the performances of openly queer and trans artists of color, Queer Voices in Hip Hop reclaims their work as essential to the development and persistence of hip hop in the United States as it tells the story of hip hop’s queer roots.

Interpreting Music Video introduces students to the musical, visual, and sociological aspects of music videos, enabling them to critically analyze a multimedia form with a central place in popular culture. With highly relevant examples drawn from recent music videos across many different genres, this concise and accessible book brings together tools from musical analysis, film and media studies, gender and sexuality studies, and critical race studies, requiring no previous knowledge. Exploring the multiple dimensions of music videos, this book is the perfect introduction to critical analysis for music, media studies, communications, and popular culture.

Whether engaged in same-sex desire or gender nonconformity, black queer individuals live with being perceived as a threat while simultaneously being subjected to the threat of physical, psychological, and socioeconomical injury. Attending to and challenging threats has become a defining element in queer black artists’ work throughout the black diaspora. GerShun Avilez analyzes the work of diasporic artists who, denied government protections, have used art to create spaces for justice. He first focuses on how the state seeks to inhibit the movement of black queer bodies through public spaces, whether on the street or across borders. From there, he pivots to institutional spaces—specifically prisons and hospitals—and the ways such places seek to expose queer bodies in order to control them. Throughout, he reveals how desire and art open routes to black queer freedom when policy, the law, racism, and homophobia threaten physical safety, civil rights, and social mobility.

Intersectional Analysis as a Method to Analyze Popular Culture: Clarity in the Matrix explores how race, class, gender, sexuality, and other social categories are represented in, and constructed by, some of the most significant popular culture artifacts in contemporary Western culture. Through readings of racialized television sitcoms, LGBTQ+ representation in mainstream American music, the role of Black Panther in Western imperialist projects, and self-love narratives promoted by social media influencers, it demonstrates how novice and emerging researchers can use intersectional theory as an analysis method in the field of cultural studies. The case studies presented are contextualized through a brief history of intersectional theory, a methodological rationale for its use in relation to popular culture, and a review of the ethical considerations researchers should take before, during, and after they approach popular artifacts. Intended to be a textbook for novice and emerging researchers across a wide range of social science disciplines, this book serves as a practical guide to uncover the multiple and interlocking ways oppression is reified, resisted and/or negotiated through popular culture. 2021 Winner of the AESA Critics’ Choice Book Award

This book engages with the concept “queer battle fatigue,” which is the everyday exhaustion that LGBTQIA+ people and communities often experience from anti-queer norms and values. Contributors express how this concept is often experienced across spaces and places, from schools to communities. Queer Battle Fatigue is one way to express the everyday exhaustion that LGBTQIA+ people and communities often feel that is a result sociopolitical and cultural anti-queer norms and values. In this volume, contributors think about how queer battle fatigue hits bodies and their multiple ways of being, knowing, and doing. Chapters describe how such violence flows from early childhood experiences to universities and across community spaces. Contributors also describe how people and communities resist and refuse anti-queer norms and values, carving out pathways to live, love, and have joy despite everyday oppressions. From calling on Black queer ancestors, to using STEM education as a safe space, to artistic representations of identities, the chapters in Queer Battle Fatigue ask readers to consider how to disrupt and deconstruct anti-queer norms while also engaging in the many beautiful forms of queer joy as an act of resistance. Queer Battle Fatigue will be a key resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Education, Qualitative Research, Queer Theory and Gender Studies, Educational Research and Curiculum Studies. The chapters included in this book were originally published as a special issue of International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.

Analysing Gender in Performance brings together the fields of Gender Studies and Performance Analysis to explore how contemporary performance represents and interrogates gender. This edited collection includes a wide range of scholarly essays, as well as artists’ voices and their accounts of their works and practices. The Introduction outlines the book’s key approaches to concepts in English language gender discourses and gender’s intersectionalities, and sets out the approaches to performance analysis and methods of research employed by the various contributors. The book focuses on performances from the Global North, staged over the past fifty years. Case studies are diverse, ranging from site-specific, dance theatre, speculative drag, installation, and music video performances to Mabou Mines, Churchill, Shakespeare and Ibsen. Contributors explore how gender intersects with sexuality, social class, race, ethnicity, indigeneity, culture and history. Read individually or in tension with one another, the essays confront the contemporary complexities of analysing gender in performance.

In this volume, authors explore the interconnected issues of spirituality and community as they relate to queer issues in the Deep South. The book begins with explorations of queer spiritualities and LGBTQ people in religious settings. Next, authors investigate and document the rise of the religious right political movement in the South. Finally, the authors of this text document community life for LGBTQ people in the Deep South, including efforts to create affirming queer spaces inside otherwise hostile locales. Through the chapters in this text, the peculiarities of spirituality and community life for LGBTQ people in the Deep South are explored. However, this volume also points to trends, themes, and dynamics at work in the Deep South that are also implicated in the queer experience in other parts of the U.S. The authors of this text push readers to think deeply about these issues, probe the limits of queer potentialities in Southern religious and community contexts, and clearly point to the interweaving of Christian religiousness, communities of practice, the operation of white supremacist heteropatriarchy in oppression of LGBTQ people, and the possibilities of affirming spiritual and community praxis.