NEITHER QUEER NOR THERE; Categories, Assemblages, Transformations

NEITHER QUEER NOR THERE; Categories, Assemblages, Transformations TEXT/MATT MORRIS Big false eyelashes being batted and white rose and Ryan Lewis' chart-topping gay rights hip- ics full of risqué same-sex desire and endlessly blossoms planted high in a naked man's but- hop anthem), these artists were the ones who fanciful permutations of gender expressions tocks. Vivid gender fiuidity and non-normative compelled my photographer friend Michael running through layered musical sensibilities sexual practices. Bearded ladies, anime, and Reece to say that this cultural moment is what that draw from LiF Kim's hard femme bitch- Billie Holiday. Confident passes through club he'd been waiting for his whole life. Friends and ery and richly textured cloud rap. But while scenes and across dance floors. Twerking, strip- colleagues across the country concurred. my approach to this music is a queer one, my ping, voguing. Haute couture and the superhe- Lelf, Mykki Blanco, House of LaDosha, Cakes research into these various artists and discus- roic erotic futurism of BCALLA fashions. Lelf's Da Killa, and Big Momma are among a bur- sions with them reveal certain tensions with otherworldly pronouncement: "This mattress geoning new wave of artists who have been queer identification. If these musical projects is Atlantis." Bougie, rächet, skag drag. House of contentiously identified with a turn toward are adamant about portraying their own sex- LaDosha's frankly forceful "It's not just bitches, "queer rap" over the past several years. The ualities and sexual fantasies, there is also the it's witches/The seventh layer of Bushwick/ phantasmagoria called into being by this refusal to be delimited only to the homosexu- They ride a wicked dick, they keep it light as group is built from a wild web of references alities that "queer" is commonly used to con- a feather and stiff as a board." Further neopa- that imagines new directions for rap and hip- note. I aim to consider these artists' ascent into ganism as Mykki Blanco identifies her project hop while leaving behind the rigid portray- visibility, the discursive limits of language as as "black magic music nigga, bianco hoodoo." als of gender and subtextual (when not bla- it has framed their exposure, and how those Harlem Renaissance, "Cuntology," and H.A.M. tantly explicit) homophobia that have been frameworks diverge from the politics of their (Hard As a Motherfucker). Paris Is Burning, the genre's staples. The campy, poppy stylings self-constructive methodologies. and in the opening of Big Momma's Mommie of such rappers as Cazwell and Big Dipper, as In conversation with Gerry Visco for Inter- Dearest, pussies are burning. The mythic off- well as Sissy Bounce royalty Big Freedia, also view magazine's website. Cakes Da Killa said, spring of Naomi Campbell known as Dosha figure in a surge of recent press that has con- "I'm not queer. I hate that word. It's not in the Devastation, whose voracious pansexuality troversially used queer theory's intellectual (or, black community. I like 'cunt.'"' In another and morphing, hermaphroditic body avails her more candidly, academic) trappings to interpret interview, when i asked what "queer" meant to to all forms of sexual delight. Cakes Da Killa's the content and practices of these musicians. I him, he answered, "It doesn't mean anything to call-outs and critiques ofthe entire framework am certainly implicated in this curious prob- me. I understand what the term means since I of "gay" or "queer" rap, including his snarky lem between production and interpretation. always surround myself with LGBT literature send-up to the fanfare surrounding out R&B As I've been exposed to these artistic projects, and cinema, but the term isn't really a part of my singer Frank Ocean's "Thinkin Bout You," when they have seemed to me to generate returns on experience being a gay male of color." Magatha on his track "Da Good Book" he rewords the queer theory's work to dismantle oppressive "Father" LaDosha, in a zine that accompanies tune as, "I've been thinking bout dick/Do you categories and to pose inquiries that don't just the House's 2013 exhibition The Whole House think about it too?" Setting themselves in con- allow for but even anticipate difference, plu- Eats, acknowledges in passing the different trast to a turn toward LGBTQ issues in music ralism, and nuance in intersectional identity reactions to being grouped: "There was a huge already under way by the likes of Ocean {not formations. And it was as a queer-identified movement called out by endless press outlets to mention the straight-identified Macklemore artist and writer that I first experienced the lyr- about the 'queer hip-hop' scene coming out of OPPOSITE: left to right, LaFemme LaDosha and Cunty Crav>/ford LaDosha [photo: Amos Mac] ARTPAPERS.ORG 33 this city right now. Whether the artists grouped ceded its arrival in parlance. The artists' objec- subtle (when not blatantly explicit) forms of together in this trend piece were happy about tions scrutinize queer theory's ability to work sexism, racism, and prejudice. If, in these dis- it or not, it's undeniable that the exposure can in the service of extremely diverse social posi- courses, "queer" is disavowed, how does one only have a positive influence [for] queer youth tions instead of being co-opted, as it is often write around the practices under consideration around the world."^ Cunty Crawford LaDosha critiqued as an even further-reaching significa- without reverting to the lure of subjectivity? (Adam Radakovich) observes how limiting it tion of education-classed white male privilege.^ What is this sung-about Neverland if it is not can be to have these musical projects catego- Is it possible to recuperate "queer" as a con- "queer space"—not, that is, the much affeared rized by sexuality: "People are simplifying gay cept that is inclusive of the many divergent "Queer Planet" Michael Warner foretold—and people to say it's 'gay music' Gay people are lis- identifications at work in these projects? What what then can we call it? tening to a lot of different types of music, and other means are available to theorize the het- In a reappropriative gesture not unlike that gay people are making a lot of different types erogeneity and hyper-attuned specificity of which "queer" underwent, Cakes and LaDosha's of music. There might be a lot of gay rappers, the spaces these artists occupy? Just as prob- use of "cunt" as a signifier of pride and praise but it's not all the same."' Big Momma, on the lematic would be to presume that an individ- also troubles conventional demarcations of other hand, explained to me how "queer" func- ual's expressed subjectivities, personal truths, gender expression as sexuality. This circula- tions ambivalently both as a reclaimed term and personalized niches are treated more equi- tion of terminology flowing, seemingly, in a of empowerment and as a slur still commonly tably outside queer theory than within the free play of signifiers and signification also employed. Still, he adopts the term. "I am a liberation politics queer theory aims to stage. points to rap's propensity for new meanings queer. I'm strange, odd, unusual, and bizarre." Despite the appearance of subjectivity to indi- coined—notably the rebranding of "nigger." As much as these artists might be grouped by viduate and to subvert dominant paradigms, This updated "cunt" recalls, however know- the articulations of homosexual and non-nor- the systems of thought that produced com- ingly, subversive philosopher Georges Bataille's mative desire in their music, they also comprise monplace notions of "the subject" (Hegel, psy- preference for "cunt" in his own esoteric sexual a spectrum of disidentification with a queer pol- choanalysis, etc.) are fraught with underlying imagination, and so this usage is but another itics, at times shirking it categorically in much hierarchies that organize subjects' accounts of example of what Patricia Hill Collins observes the same way it was itself intended to break themselves in relation to more or considerably is "a reworking of historical language ... situ- down restrictive social constructions that pre- less privilege, access, and exposure through ated at an ideological crossroads that both rep- ABOVE, LEFT: LaFemme LaDosha; ABOVE, RIGHT: Cunty Crawford LaDosha [photos: Amos Mac] 34 ART PAPERS f .** licates and resists intersecting oppressions."^ It broad categorical terms and discrete subjec- all fluid contributors in the production of just is Collins' aim to temper the radicality of new tive identities, where Johnson finds material this passing comment on House of LaDosha's uses of language with a risk assessment that experience as a useful counterbalance to aca- creative output. For these artists, adopting the accounts for the good and harm simultane- demia's detached discourses. While not being familial house structure from New York's drag ously at work in the crafting of vocabularies fully exempt from categorical language such ball scene means operating from a hybridized with which to propose alternative worlds and as "gay," "Black," or "educated," the difference collective position. It may be that "house" does social structures. in approach is in noting the accumulations of everything that "queer" could hypothesize, One hopes for new, reconciliatory terms of traits, qualities, and circumstances that are at working as a flexible category from which dif- engagement that extend the queer theoretical play in a cultural position. While the model of ferent racial, gendered, or otherwise classed project's work to interrogate and deconstruct an ontologically stable subject that has been perspectives may be momentarily empowered, the apparatuses constituting social categories advanced from psychoanalysis into essential- experimented with, or deconstructed.

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