Alternative performances of race and gender in hip-hop music : nerdcore counterculture.

In his documentary entitled, Nerdcore For Life, director Dan Lamoureux described Nerdcore as a powerful social collision between hip hop and geek culture . Born on the Internet, Nerdcore Hip-Hop is rap music made by geeks, for geeks and covers such traditionally nerdy topics such as comic books, video games, science fiction, anime, technology, etc. Though it has existed online for almost a decade, only recently has Nerdcore gone from being an Internet fad to an underground cultural phenomenon. This paper investigated how hegemonic constructions of race and gender within both the dominant public sphere and hip-hop culture are subverted and reinvented within Nerdcore counterculture. The birth narrative of the Nerdcore movement, as depicted in film documentaries Nerdcore For Life and Nerdcore Rising, provides a public platform for self-proclaimed nerds to assert cultural power and agency through hip hop music—even while the performance of white, nerdy masculinity, made all the more nerdy by contrast with mainstream hip hop\u27s machismo, subverts that power. The Nerdcore genre has created a transgressive space within the underground hip-hop movement in which marginalized geek culture can claim ownership of an identity alternative to mainstream expectations of gender and race. The content of Nerdcore differentiates itself from mainstream hip-hop by speaking to the heart of geek culture, but also utilizes hip-hop\u27s ability to express the oppressed experiences of today\u27s youth. Nerdcore challenges the traditional misogynistic, hyper-masculine mainstream construction associated with both white and black masculinities, and offers a safe space in which to perform alternative masculinities. Nerdcore artists offer a unique new strategy for achieving authenticity as white performers in hip-hop counterculture-a conscious subversion. The geek identity presented by Nerdcore does not attempt to recreate gender and racial stereotypes visible in hip-hop nor does it parody hip-hop culture. Nerdcore performers have developed a space to offer a conscious narrative of subversion for alternative identity performances in hip-hop music

Dissecting action sports studies: Past, present, and beyond

The term “action sports” broadly refers to a wide range of mostly individualized activities such as BMX, kite-surfing, skateboarding, surfing, and snowboarding that differed – at least in their early phases of development – from traditional rule-bound, competitive, regulated Western “achievement” sport cultures ( Booth and Thorpe, 2007 ; Kusz, 2007a ; Wheaton 2004, 2010 ). Various categorizations have been used to describe these activities, including extreme, lifestyle, and alternative sports. In this chapter, however, the term action sports is used as it is currently the preferred term among committed participants and industry members in North America and Australasia (many of whom reject the overly commercialized “extreme” moniker imposed upon them by transnational media and mainstream sponsors during the mid- and late 1990s). Many action sports gained popularity during the new leisure trends of the 1960s and 1970s and increasingly attracted alternative youth, who appropriated these activities and infused them with a set of hedonistic and carefree philosophies and subcultural styles ( Booth and Thorpe, 2007 ; Thorpe and Wheaton, 2011a ; Wheaton, 2010 )

‘The Others’: Gender and Conscientious Objection in the First World War

In a time when ‘if one was born a male, one became a soldier’, what does it mean to be a man who refuses to fight? This article uses Connell’s framework of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ to locate conscientious objectors’ male identities as a suppressed, subaltern manliness that deviated from the dominant norm of martial masculinity. It argues that despite rejecting many aspects of this norm, objectors nonetheless articulated their counter-hegemonic struggle in starkly militarised language, presenting themselves as heroes sacrificing their lives for the greater good. It suggests that in order to understand, rather than merely judge, this strategy, it is important to see masculinity not as a completely discrete field of struggle, but as one of many mutually constitutive structuring principles underpinning a social order that is arranged not merely along patriarchal lines, but along lines of nation and class. In turn, these other principles impose limits on the nature of and possibilities for counter-hegemonic struggle

NEGOTIATING MASCULINITY IN TABLETOP ROLEPLAYING GAME SPACES

As video games and other gaming has become a popular media form, with 60% of Americans playing games daily (Entertainment Software Association [ESA], 2018), gaming communities have increased in size and participation. While scholarly research has consistently found that women are marginalized in these communities, little research has looked at how men see these communities. Research on homosociality shows that men use communities and relationships with other men to access masculinity (Bird, 1996; Dellinger, 2004; Houston, 2012). Building on game studies and masculinity studies, this research looks at the way men in tabletop roleplaying game communities understand their involvement and the ways their involvement connects with masculinity. Tabletop gaming communities give men access to a form of masculinity they may be denied, primarily by providing access to other ways of building social capital and relationships with other men

The challenges of intersectionality: Researching difference in physical education

Researching the intersection of class, race, gender, sexuality and disability raises many issues for educational research. Indeed, Maynard (2002, 33) has recently argued that ‘difference is one of the most significant, yet unresolved, issues for feminist and social thinking at the beginning of the twentieth century’. This paper reviews some of the key imperatives of working with ‘intersectional theory’ and explores the extent to these debates are informing research around difference in education and Physical Education (PE). The first part of the paper highlights some key issues in theorising and researching intersectionality before moving on to consider how difference has been addressed within PE. The paper then considers three ongoing challenges of intersectionality – bodies and embodiment, politics and practice and empirical research. The paper argues for a continued focus on the specific context of PE within education for its contribution to these questions

Embedding Nationalism: Construction & Effects of National Narratives in the XXVII Olympic Games\u27 Opening Ceremony

This thesis examines the construction and effects of the XXVII Olympic Games’ opening ceremony as a national narrative, scripted by and for the state. The performance’s chronological structure and staging of its characters have profound effects on how Australian bodies are read and remembered as citizens. The ceremony’s narrative features a distorted retelling of colonial history that produces enormous consequences in how Indigenous and non-Indigenous, male and female actors are presented. An analysis of these characters reveals how the national narrative comes to function as a piece of political propaganda that perpetuates idealized forms of citizenship within a hegemonic patriarchal society

Media construction of Korean transnational sporting masculinities

This study examined discursively produced transnational masculinities through mediated Korean-born sport celebrities playing in the major league baseball. Considering that studies of men and masculinity are more likely to offer richer, more in-depth analyses when they recognize the intersections of class, race, gender, sexuality, and nationality, this research explored diverse and plural conflations of contemporary masculinities in transnational contexts. In the process, I took into account a variety of theoretical approaches including post-colonial feminist theory, queer theory, critical race theory, new manism theory, and hegemonic theory in order to find a more appropriate theoretical framework for the analysis of transnational subjectivities. Linking theoretical frames with feminist critical discourse analysis and Fairclough's three dimensions of critical discourse analysis, I investigated multiple media sport texts including online newspapers and reader comments in US and South Korean contexts. Based on a total number of 108 media texts in online newspapers, six distinguishing thematic discourses were analyzed: athletic masculinities, heterosexual patriarchal masculinities, militarized masculinities, trans/nationalist masculinities, Korean Confucian masculinities, and color solidarity. Through analyzing a total number of 83 media texts in reader comments, also, four dominant discourse categories were identified: othering masculinities, regulating bodies, commodified transnational masculinities, and multifaceted androcentric nationalism. The results illustrate that diversely conflated transnational relationships and the intersectional factors including race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality have an influence on shaping the hybridity of Korean sporting masculinities. Resisting a dominant dichotomous perception that the western males and masculinities are standardized as a norm but Asian/Korean males and masculinities are merely effeminate, the results of this study effectively illuminate newly racialized transnational subjects and the masculinities under the power of new imperialism