Double Entendre Got Bodied

Abstract

I explore how two Latinx young men made use of rapping within a creative and healing afterschool hip hop space at a California Bay Area High School. I argue that they performed a calculated, strategic ambivalence. That is, just as they composed raps that made use of wordplay with double or more meanings, they constructed personhoods that quite literally embodied double or more meanings. They became the embodiment of double entendre, strategically performing, rapping and narrativizing personas that allowed them to synchronously survive the classroom and the 'hood, subverting the "White gaze" and the gaze of the streets.