Description
This paper will discuss the changing dynamics and visibilities of queer politics in Sydney’s hip-hop dance community, which has been exacerbated by the proliferation of ‘all-style’ battles. These battles incorporate a myriad of what is more commonly referred to as ‘street-dance’ styles and their respective music genres (such as breaking, popping, locking, [freestyle] hip-hop, waacking, krumping, house, and voguing). While breaking is considered one of the ‘four elements’ of hip-hop culture, the dominance of hip-hop’s cultural conventions, such as heteronormativity and patriarchal structures, are confronted, indeed disrupted, through the dynamics of the all-style dancefloor. Here, the intermixing and joining of divergent performativities, styles, and cultural histories reconstitute hip-hop’s rigid hierarchies of gender and sexuality by offering a site for plurality. This paper thus explores the potential for all-style battles to unify and democratise the distinctions within hip-hop culture in a way that subverts the disciplinary regimes of heternormativity.| Period | 27 Jun 2019 |
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| Event title | XX Biennial IASPM Conference: Turns and Revolutions in Popular Music Studies |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Canberra, Australia, Australian Capital TerritoryShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |