User talk:Pwyrick/sandbox

“Hip Hop and The Black Ratchet Imagination,” was written by LaMonda Horton-Stallings and published in 2012 in the Palimpset volume 2, issue 2, by State University of New York Press. Horton-Stallings opens the article up by restating the claim made by Cathy Cohen that hip hop shapes Black politics which has historically instigated moral panics. She analyses hip hop as a Black liberation movement with above and below tactics, as a genre it refuses to be pinned down it embodies a fluidity that makes it best read through a lens of queerness. A queer reading of hip hop shifts the discourse away from race and nation or fixed bodies in transitional spaces, to focus instead on transitional bodies in transitional spaces to subvert heteropatriarchy. Privileging certain mediums and forms can recreate hierarchies within subcultures, she warns it is best to focus on content instead.

“Hip hop is Black funk’s intervention on Greek and Roman Eros,” Horton-Stallings claims, referencing her other work "Funk the Erotic,” which reframes funk not as just a music genre, tracing the word back to its linguistic roots in Africa where it meant a strong smell derived from hard work, which was admirable, sensual, and good luck especially when it came from an elder. She expands that hip hop disrupts Western imperialist knowledge creation and socio-cultural reproduction. She develops the concept of Black Ratchet Imagination stating that any revolution must begin with the ability to imagine a new world, reconstruct relationships, all with an emphasis on love and creativity rather than rationality and hierarchy. Furthermore, the Black Ratchet Imagination encompasses the performance of failure which acknowledges that failing, unknowing, undoing, and unbecoming are sometimes more creative, spontaneous, and constructive ways to engage the world, rather than reproducing drudgery, monotony, and inequality by socialized default. Black Ratchet Imagination embraces the radical potential of celebrating subverting imposed expectations.

Strip club rap embodies misogyny through a superficial investigation, and intent to use sexual leisure to critique Western sexual morality at a deeper level. Strip club culture is shaped as much by women as men and to write their agency out of analysis is just as misogynistic as rap may be claimed to be. Strip club culture acts as a queer space, as gender and sexuality are performatively refigured Black “female dancers undoing of woman,” creates the inspirational energy that fuels the music; Horton-Stallings asks why it is we value the product of the music more than the form (dance) that it was derived from? This need for accessible spaces to carry out communal sex positive activities and to transgress race, class, and sexual boundaries has always been present, and in the face of violent policing has been pushed underground, highly present but rendered less-visible. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pwyrick (talk • contribs) 07:44, 13 February 2019 (UTC)