Yesterday, three pieces I wrote or contributed to all showed up in my inbox within minutes of each other. They range from discussions in hip hop culture to participatory politics as resistance. See more below.
Participations: Dialogues on the Participatory Promise of Contemporary Culture and Politics Part 3: POLITICS
Your questions have me thinking about digital literacy and the assumptions people make about who has access to the Internet and what kinds of access they have. A lot more people of color access the Internet
through their cell phones, which can limit the types of digital platforms that are available to them. It impacts both people’s ability to participate at all and the types of digital participation that are possible. To echo Alexis, “deep and sustained analysis of the uneven ground on which participation takes place is also necessary.” I think part of this work is taking place on this thread.
Contextualizing Lord Jamar, Le1f, and hip hops homophobic history
Assimilation into the ruling class does not undo the structures that oppress people. For me, gay marriage is a distraction from issues that unite queer people with other marginalized folks. Dealing with the way that homophobia, transphobia, sexism, ableism, impact education, health care, housing, and employment would be a more useful endeavor than symbolic songs like “Same Love.” Marriage is an institution that affords people all kinds of benefits in our country and for me, the question is why those benefits are only available through this one act; why can’t everybody just have what they need, regardless of whether they are married or not?
New Terms of Resistance: A Response to Zenzele Isoke
Zenzele Isoke’s “’Why Am I Black?’ Women, Hip Hop, and Cultural Resistance in Dubai,” explores the ways that eight Black women in Dubai use their engagement within global hip hop culture to resist gender oppression in their own lives. Isoke’s interviews provide a window into the transformative power of music and what Patricia Hill Collins calls transversal politics that identify two similarly phenomena from different locations that can be discussed in tandem. I find this theoretical framework’s deployment refreshing as it attempts to add to our toolbox and give intersectionality a break from doing a lot of the heavy lifting for Black feminist thought. In my own work I too am interested in identifying new logics that provide more specificity in the ways we engage our scholarship.