Hip Hop Heresies

Abstract

Hip Hop Heresies: Queer Aesthetics in New York City brings together Black, queer, and hip hop aesthetics through a study of New York City artists and artistic scenes in multiple media from 1975 to the present. I argue that they queerlyarticulate gender, racial, and sexual identitarian performances through specifically New York–based aesthetic and artistic practices and cues. These performances could emerge and concentrate only in New York because of the city’s bodily co-mingling (queer, Black, trans, immigrant, and other people of color) and genre experimentation (hip hop, house music, punk, funk, disco). Although these bodies and genres existed in other locales—Chicago: the birthplace of house music: Philadelphia: the hub of contemporary graffiti; and Los Angeles: a city central to the development of hip hop dance—New York City’s nexus of vibrant queer, Black, and hip hop worlds colliding and bonding in dance clubs, housing complexes, schools, roller rinks, art spaces, handball and basketball courts, movie house, specific neighborhoods, the subway system, and other quotidian, subcultural, and ephemeral sites uniquely position New York as a place of experimental and original aesthetic collaboration.